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To Clean
by Amelia Elaine Pearce Standing by the window as light beams in, it’s clean. The bed made, soft, inviting, No need for tiptoeing around on a clean floor. Show up. Rummage through my drawers, grab and yank sweet silk and rip and fling every folded shirt, and pull drawers from safe cupboards and haul candles Continue reading
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Photography by Marc Frazier
Marc Frazier has published in over a hundred forty journals. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” His four books are available online. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Continue reading
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Mourning Before Death
by Diana Raab we sit by the riverand like waterthat hasn’t moved in decadesmy eyes become filled with tears. at ninety-two, my mother is dying reclined in someone else’s brown vinyl chair, drooping orchids on windowsill.television blaring nonsensical dialogue which she no longer hears, black and white cat on coralbed cover, the same color of her horsewhich I made Continue reading
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Firing Sonny Lane
by Mark Connelly Everybody hates Sonny Lane now. The pile-on was predictable from the Joe Rogan interviews to the SNL skits. He wasn’t in R Kelly or Weinstein territory but as cancelled as can be. Not facing jail but enduring the St. Helena of Betty Ford and Dr. Drew mea culpas. He’d always been a Continue reading
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Two Flash Fiction Pieces by Shareen K. Murayama
Where We Grew Up Where we grew up, our mother’s half moon eyes and laughter disappeared in the scissors of the mountains. We mapped her happiness to our father, but directions are just hand-me-downs of where someone’s already been. Where we grew up, they blanketed the lake with a golf course. Blue were our mother’s Continue reading
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Artwork by Sean Bw Parker
Sean Bw Parker (MA) is a writer, artist and musician based in Worthing, West Sussex. He lived in Istanbul for ten years, has written or contributed to a number of books and albums, and given a TED talk. He was born in Exeter in 1975. Continue reading
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Inbox
by Niles Reddick Sartre believed hell was other people, and he may have been right, although he hallucinated crabs followed him around Paris. He didn’t have an Inbox. My Inbox is hell—all life’s annoyances dinging in on me daily even after they’ve been blocked, even after I’ve unsubscribed (though I’d never subscribed): the good neighbor Continue reading
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Cold War Sonnet
by Charlie Brice In Cheyenne we never did those drillswhere we hid under our desks, paperatop our heads, to fend off the falloutthat would kill us. Frances E. Warren Air Force Base was two miles away.Cheyenne was ringed with ICBMs hiddenin prairie-silos. In Cheyenne, we practicedgetting home on time. If it took more than fifteen Continue reading
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Two Poems by M F Drummy
Bindweed It seems almost laughable now but,in those early months of lawlessness,many still held out hope. The tanks had not yetrumbled across Main Street, the elders among uscautioning restraint with the arrestof the first judge. So,when the snow began to melt,spring giving way to summer onthe vast grasslands,little patcheshere and there of blue flaxand buttonsof Continue reading
January House Literary Journal 