The Everlasting Meal and the Disappearance of the Sun —fiction by Stephen Barone‏

Primed with confidence, I entered the event space in which the reunion was taking place. The Emcee stood above those gathered together in reminiscence as his mind swept across the crowd probing for a target.

"Bobby Kincaid! Or do you now go by Bob? You still look like a Bobby to me you lucky son of a bitch! Am I right ladies? You look like you were knocked unconscious at the home coming game and just woke-up on the field five minutes ago. Be careful around your daughter's friends; just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!"

He was right. But it wasn't just Bobby. Everyone had remained the same but some had weathered harsher storms. Somehow the elements had taken effect while time had gone missing. For example, Heather Samms was last seen sneaking her lunch into the girls' lavatory in order to evade remarks about her weight. I now stood ten feet from that same person who only moments ago felt secure enough to exit the restroom. Evidence of the lunch she had eaten lingered in the form of orange flakes sprinkled around the perimeter of her mouth.

My hand slipped loose from my wife's grip as I wandered, gazing spellbound at faces, attempting to fill in the gaps between then and now: Lucy Sawyer had laid herself down inside a tanning bed with a bottle of bourbon, she awoke fifteen hours ago. Tim Danner had fallen asleep on top of a pile of money as negotiations resumed their course. He rose this morning with most of his fortune intact but his hair now white and his stomach lined with ulcers. Amber King missed her connecting flight. She ambled along the concourse before deciding to lie down on the floor and snuggle up to her backpack. Her name was called to gate 36. She now felt an urgent need to settle down and move to the country.

I wondered how I appeared. Where had I laid down to rest? Did those like Kevin Burns who leapt off the St. Johns Bridge believe they would land here wide awake inside the convention center?

We made promises to call, email, and text one another. My wife and I walked outside to our car, each of us now accompanied by a light buzz. She offered to drive sensing that my mind was elsewhere.

We detoured through the old neighborhood. My attention was drawn to an empty plot of land where twenty four years ago, Alan Potts and his family sat down for dinner and the earth opened up beneath them. I see him still fifteen years of age. The chatter at the dinner table having ceased long ago. He and his family feign interest in their meal while making an effort to ignore the disappearance of the sun.


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Stephen Barone resides in Portland, OR where he is currently working towards a masters in special education. His work has been featured in Chiron Review.

Poem For The Migrant —a poem by James Diaz

Poem For The Migrant

Careful sentence
spoken in dry, lost syllables-
the place is different,
as kids we were from nowhere.

This they called 'a mystery 
that we might learn later'
but I had plans to crack its
lazy secret open
before I grew too old to hear 

its challenge.

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The Poet: James Diaz lives in upstate New York. His poems and stories have appeared in Collective Exile, Ditch, Pismire, Cheap Pop Lit and My Favorite Bullet.

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The Photographer: Faun Scurlock is a digital artist/photographer born and raised in Vancouver, WA. The constant weather changes of the Pacific Northwest bring her plenty of opportunity to capture landscapes, action shots, and abstract photographs. Faun's been published in multiple journals - The Phoenix and Salmon Creek Journal - and included in a student art show at Clark College.

Dereliction —prose poem by Keith Moul

Few allow a moment for dereliction, especially in a lush green field. Crumbling is to some, apparently, a private act, potential for public liability, third and first parties in perpetual confrontation. But the rude erection; the occupation of land; the sweat of felling, notching and building; the creation of a calm interior, windows to look out at a path or road for passersby or friends in similar pursuit, pioneers whose restlessness would make them stop, talk and share, but probably not destroy.

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Prose-poem and visual art by Keith Moul. His works are published widely. Finishing Line Press will issue his latest chap, The Future as a Picnic Lunch, in September, 2015.

Moving Man —a poem by Wayne F. Burke

I worked a day laborer's job

as moving man

and carried box after box

of books

out of a professor's house

and into a truck

on a tree-lined street

in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The guy working with me

took it easy

and carried about half of what

I did

and at one point I told him

to get a move-on

and he looked at me like I was

crazy

and maybe I was

and late in the afternoon

the truck driver gave me shit

for slowing down

and I went off on him,

a screaming fit,

and he blanched

and said that he knew

what my problem was

and he handed me an extra ten

but

lack of money was not

my real problem--

the world was.

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Wayne Burke's work has appeared in FORGE, miller's pond, and Northeast Corridor. He was poet-of-the-month in Bareback, 7-13.

Art of the Joke —a poem by JD DeHart

Art of the Joke

from first line born
with a slight cracking
grin
to the last punctuation
punch line

with just the right pause
here
and the necessary
inflection there

there was no way
to predict
a silent room response.


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JD DeHart is a writer and teacher. His chapbook, The Truth About Snails, is available from RedDashboard.

I Dreamed I Was —a poem by A.J. Huffman

I Dreamed I Was 

chased into an attic by a tiger
that was really a little girl. I think
she was supposed to be me, but I had forgotten
her so long she had grown fangs & claws

& emanated unfriendly growls full of devouring intentions,
but it wasn’t me she longed to bite.
(That would have been a hollow victory.) Her eyes
were set firmly on the darkness of the same
past she came from. I could not stare along
with her maintained intensity. I soon grew tired
& blinked (as the living often do). She smiled
maliciously as her color began to fade
back to gray, then black, & she made a point
of consuming herself before I had fully fallen
back into the hostile & surprisingly hungry
embrace of sleep.


___
A.J. Huffman has published eleven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press) and A Few Bullets Short of Home are now available from their respective publishers. She has two additional poetry collections forthcoming: Degeneration from Pink Girl Ink, and A Bizarre Burning of Bees from Transcendent Zero Press. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has published over 2200 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com

All Over but the Shouting —a poem by M.E. Lerman

The fridge groans and hisses at us
Like it’s watching a bad comedy act.
“I never cheated on you” I put the lukewarm tr
uth
  —as if it mattered—
  into the ceramic embrace of a mall-kiosk coffee mug.
Once a broken record, now you silently spin on the turntable
And I’m too far away to caress any of your grooves
  read any of your moods
     The song is gone.

You gaze into the sink and the celestial network of twists and turns
  —the real meaning of pipe dream—
    Of destiny and wastewater
    and unseen empires of constellations
I was once a vault of stars
                                        to you.

We are a stale-popcorn opera,
  All over but the shouting,
    And for the fridge, it can’t end fast enough.


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Editor by day and writer by earlier in the day, M. E. Lerman has been published in Poetica Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and his work has been featured in the British Fantasy Society Journal. Also a multi-instrumentalist and amateur recording artist under the name Mike L. Rock, he lives in Rockville, MD, with his partner, Donovan, and their cat, Sa$ha. His blog can be found at thenewgodofhellfire.wordpress.com.

I Didn't Speak Up —an essay by Bonnie Wilkins Overcott

Artist: Allen Forrest 

I recognized the woman, with the bleached hair, dark roots and a life-worn face, struggling to pull her ponderous body up the steps of the bus. She was the woman who attempted to leave her child in the church nursery Sunday morning so she could do some shopping. She wasn’t a member of our church, but it was across the street from the grocery store, and I’m sure she knew her son would be safe with us. Something within the boy, though, did not want her to leave him. He cried and created such a fuss that she took him with her when she left.

She sat down on the seats facing me at the front of the bus, rifling through her purse for the bus fare. She was drunk. At one point, she put her arm and hand around her stomach and said, “I don’t feel well.” I was in no mood to get vomited on by a drunken woman, so I moved away to the middle of the bus.

A young professional man got on the bus and sat where I had been sitting. When she told the bus driver that she was just sure she had bus fare, the man across from her said, “I’ll give you the money for a bus ride, if you get off and take another bus.” People on the bus laughed. The woman began to weep as the bus driver assured her he’d drop her off when she reached her destination.

As she wept, she complained to the bus driver that she didn’t understand why people were so cruel. The young man wouldn’t let up. He berated her during the entire trip as the rest of the passengers laughed and clapped. Finally she reached her stop and thanked the bus driver for his kindness before she got off. As she put her foot on the ground, the entire bus cheered. She walked home with the insults and jeers echoing in her mind. And I never spoke up.

___
The Writer: Bonnie Wilkins Overcott writes nonfiction and fiction. She maintains a blog/resource at http://workinginthe21stcentury.com/. She previously wrote for newspapers, her employer’s newsletter/journal, and had a short story published in the Work Literary Magazine in July.
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The Artist: Allen Forrest's work is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh. Allen Forrest can be found at his website or on twitter.

so gorgeous —a poem by Melissa Parietti

The man's chin hairs seem oddly out of place
Facial scruff, black, shouldn't be so suspect,
but his were very interesting in her eyes. perhaps
there was a deeper reasoning for her intrigue,
meaning is easily confused-she didn't want to be
so caught up, especially when the rest of him was
so gorgeous.


___

Melissa Parietti is a native of Long Island originally from Melville, New York. She attended business classes and writing workshops at SUNY Geneseo. At 24 years old, her poetry has received several acceptances to print and online journals. An example of her work can be found here. Her LinkedIn can be found here. Her Twitter handle is @MelissaParie

The Janitor Cleans the Window —a short poem by Danny P. Barbare

Cleaning the window polishing a smile to a shine such a happy thing to do to feel the sun inside.

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Danny P. Barbare has been writing poetry on and off for 34 years. He has a book available through amazon.com and on kindle called Christmas Poems. He works as a janitor and resides with his family in the foothills of the Carolinas.

A Poet's Perspective —a poem by Marc Carver

A Poet's Perspective 

All these poems,
all these years,
if you stood them on top of each other
word on word,
letter on letter,
they would probable be as high as the tower of babel
as high as Jack's beanstalk.
But how many people read them
or feel them
I have no idea,
so why do I continue to write them
well
nobody else can.

___
Marc Carver has published six books of poetry and works as an editor for a site in New York. He has had about three hundred poems published around the world but most of all he hopes people enjoy his work and it inspires them to pick up the pen and turn the tv off.