by Anne Howkins

Sea and sky are indecipherable—at night there’s a moonlit line that might be the horizon. Sometimes the flood laps at the weather girl’s bedroom window, seductively shush-shushing that it means no harm. Sometimes it growls the anguish of the drowned.

Without power or paper, the weather girl records her observations in knots. She’s ransacked the house, harvesting anything that can be unravelled, combed, spun, twisted, until every surface is strewn with something like rope, and the wardrobes and cupboards gape empty.

She’s woven and knotted pressure, windspeed and rainfall into whirligig clusters. Her fingers weep blood as the malevolent sky mocks her furious recording. On days when the heavens are silver, not cast iron, when the winds are gentle, yet deviously warm, she allows the ropes to divide. She threads them with rings, necklaces, beads and buttons, treasured memories marking love she hopes isn’t lost. When the barometer falls, again, again, and the house begins moaning, she plaits the strands back together, securing everything precious. She weaves her own undoing into the tapestries, until her limbs feel empty, ready to hold something again, hold her husband again.

At night she wraps herself in her knotted yarns, caressing, letting her fingers explore the chasms she’s seen, she’s created. Sometimes she burrows her nails deep, finds the day her husband left. When her fingers stroke the remnants of love, her heart untethers, her lungs loosen and she weeps, letting the rhythm of the endlessly cruel rain rattling the roof rock her back and forth.

She leaves on a night when the moonlit line is more than a dream. She spools ropes into a sail, launches herself towards the east, hoping her forecast is accurate and the grasping hands of the drowned keep to themselves.

Hoping there is something dry out there.

* * *

Anne loves the challenge of telling stories in very few words. Her stories have appeared in print and online at WestWord, Flash 500, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Lunate, Strands International and Bath Flash Fiction.

by Marcelo Medone

Flavius hurried towards the two-masted vessel that had just docked.
His friend Titus came down the ramp and they embraced.
“How was the trip? Did you have good weather?” asked Flavius.
“Better than here, for sure,” answered Titus, observing the leaden sky.
That night, burning ashes rained down on Pompeii.

* * *

Marcelo Medone (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in more than 50 countries, including Canada. He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

by Mathieu Parsy

Once inseparable, jealousy over a boy caused a landslide that buried their friendship. Their chests turned into large crevices, overgrown with trees and foliage. Tectonic plates shifted in search of a mutual core, but the continents didn’t align. As new rock formations spanned the distance, the divide remained. Their magnetic fields wavered—drawn close, yet skewed off course.
 
And eruptions disturbed the stagnation, the magma of their discontent reshaping the landscape.
 
From the Atlantic ridge, Isadora can only glimpse the tip of a crag surrounded by murky waters, mist filling the air. Chirping warblers peck at her chest—out-of-tune memories. It aches. Her skin splits; warblers burrow into her heart. She cups the wound to contain the pain.
 
One day, Isadora splays her fingers to peek through the gap between her breasts. She sees the other side of the Eurasian plate, where her friend lives. Green hills and dense forests have grown there. And then she spots her friend—she bears a similar hole in her thorax. There’s no bird there. Only an abandoned nest.

* * *

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera and now lives in Toronto, where he works in the travel industry. His writing has been featured in FEED, Panoply, and Brilliant Flash Fiction.
Instagram: @mathieu_parsy.

by Bonnie Demerjian

His glinty eye,
alert for the shiny,
avid for the curious.
He’s a connoisseur of beauty
and feels no guilt.

I too am a collector— 
subjects for poems,
bright objects of delight
brought home to my nest, my desk
to sort and muse upon.

* * *

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her home in the Tongass National Forest, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her poetry has appeared in Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, Blue Heron Review and October Hill Magazine, among others.

by Michael Brockley

I ramble the noonday route through my neighborhood wearing new Keen hiking boots. When the small dogs on Berkeley bound across their lawn to greet me, I boast about their territorial imperative. The pleasures harmonized by their pacing the fence beside my joy. Along Lanewood, I inhale the fragrance from a pie someone is baking. Perhaps cherry crumb, a confection deliciously sweet and sour. When my left shoelace works loose, I tighten both shoes on a bench by the free library box. It is the day the last pear petals fall, the time before serviceberries ripen from pink to plum.

* * *

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Gyroscope Review. Poems are forthcoming in Stormwash: Environmental Poems, Volume II and 912 Review. 

by Ed Ahern

Years ago, hunting deer in a forest, I stumbled onto an abandoned farmstead. There were no traces of roads or pathways into the site, no wood or glass or iron. Just the stone cairn of a chimney, and tumbled rock fences, strewn by trees. Connecticut is stoney soil, the clearing and stacking would have been the labor of years.

A chill, soft rain was falling, birds and animals were silent and still. The smell was of sodden leaves and the mold of rotted trees. As I moved cemetery-slowly through the grounds, I wanted to put a name to the ruined labor—the someone or other house, the something or other farm. But there were only age scattered rocks.

And there, where I thought a sitting room might have been, was a neatly stacked cairn, three feet high, that weathering could not have accomplished. A body perhaps, or a keepsake interred at the home it belonged to.

I propped my rifle against a sapling and lifted off the cap stone, intending to burrow down to discovery. And hesitated. And put it back. Undisturbed. What I imagined was more than I could discover, more than I could unearth.
​
I moved on, the farmstead undisturbed and unrecorded. And have long since forgotten its location.

* * *

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had about 500 stories and poems published so far, and ten books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he manages a posse of seven review editors, and as lead editor at Scribes Micro.

by Daniel Rogers

autumn wind
the busker's guitar
out of tune


sunset
the fruit bowl
full of oranges

​
starry night
flicking through
an old diary
​
* * *

Born and raised in Lancashire, England, Daniel moved to Poland in 2015, where he now teaches English as a foreign language. When not divulging the finer points of English grammar, he likes to write.

by Philippa Ramsden

As autumn settles, 
poppies continue to appear 
and bloom, albeit 
under a veil of raindrops.

* * *

Following a career in international development, Philippa Ramsden returned to Scotland somewhat adrift and has now settled in East Lothian. Her writing draws from life and work in Nepal, Mongolia, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Rwanda and her Scottish surroundings.

by Linda M. Crate

let me change like autumn,
transform into my prettiest colors;
let everything dead fade
away into the sky;
bathe me in a golden sunset
that could heal every
broken thing in my soul. 

* * *

Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose works you can find at her social media links: 
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

by Lynn White

​Just a raindrop
falling,
falling into wetness.
A silvery teardrop
which splatters
then disappears
into wetness,
to become invisible
as if by magic.

​* * *

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. Visit Lynn's Facebook Poetry Page here. 

by Michael Brockley

The red maple rises above the crowns of pears and serviceberries. Trees an arborist planted in my yard twenty years ago. Now the maple’s roots girdle the trunk, and the bark darkens with stoic resilience. In the evenings, I spread the palms of my hands across the knobs where limbs were trimmed back so a mower could cut the grass beneath the canopy. I ask what songs the neighborhood forest sings through its underground choir. What sustenance might be received from nearby silver maples. From spring’s transient redbuds. My calendar reads mid-October. The tree’s leaves still green. And summer strong. 

* * *

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, Superpresent, and Dreams of Rust and Glass, Volume 2. Poems are forthcoming in Last Stanza Poetry Journal and confetti. ​

by John Grey

Trilling air
in morning fog
flutters the treetops.
 
Then mist lifts,
warblers emerge,
lake mirrors sky
from here
to the mountain foothills
 
And huge vistas
now encompass the small,
from a beetle on a leaf
to the roses in a garden.
 
The opaque has its charms
but clarity gives voice
to depth and distance
 
With light in abundance,
all colors are accounted for.
 
And ghosts are now people
with long lives ahead of them.

* * *

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and  “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.

by Joshua St. Claire

summer revival
a cicada
thrums down the sky

cosmic strings
a daddy-long-legs casts shadows
onto asbestos shingles

a common swallowtail floats
through the hydrangea sky
deepening blue

sunset
the horizon bent under
the weight of peaches

dog days
the islands of the Susquehanna
lost in their haze

Shakespeare in the park
a red-winged blackbird becomes
the king of infinite space 

the sky
growing violet at the edges
crowcaw

golden hour
an evening primrose blossoms
into deep time

the press of blue on blue hydrangea moon

* * *
​
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from Pennsylvania. His haiku have been published broadly including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. His favorite thing to write about is the sky.

by E.C. Traganas

​That look of yours!
As if the whole forest
would bow in your presence 
willows waving their hands 
in salute, larch trees
snapping to attention,
a copper beech in deep,
resplendent curtsy.

How like an unsuspecting moth
was I, a simple speck
on that faraway bark;
Aiming high, flying straight 
and swift like a pin, burning,
falling dead at your feet.

Such were the magnets
of your eyes.

* * *

Author of the debut novel Twelfth House and Shaded Pergola, a collection of short poetry with original illustrations, E.C. Traganas has published in a multitude of literary journals. She enjoys a professional career as a Juilliard-trained concert pianist & composer, and is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York.