ISSUE SIX, WINTER 2012

FICTION

THE MODELby Amira Pierce
When Mustafa first had seen a drawing of the girl done by one of Steven’s students, the hesitant lines that depicted her form managed to set off an odd shock inside him, something he knew was true, though he had no idea what it meant.

COMFORT FOOD by Holly Day
apocalyptic dreams comfort us / show an end to credit card debt, to war, / the confusion with our day-to-day ordinary lives

SICK TIMEby Mark DeCarteret
Yes, they’ve kept to most of their promises, erecting the swing set in somebody’s memory, replacing one river with another, so I guess we’ll go on cashing their checks in silence, our lives lived in past tense and swung from our necks.

A DAY AT THE OFFICEby Angie Mazakis
I spend a lot of the day rearranging / sharp objects so they’re not pointing / at me or someone else. Incidentally, one / other person at the office also has this phobia.

THREE POEMS by Keith Montesano
Because the snow is falling, because I am here & falling, / & listening, I see them, early, too early, before the man / takes the plunge from the mountain’s edge.

ANNIVERSARY PREMONITIONby Trent Nutting
What the young will remember, huddled / like toadstools in this leaning grove of adults, / is the great uncle’s whistled s, his mouth / translated to flute and eyes rheumy / with the overflowing tears of the old.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT LOSING ONE’S HEADby Adam Krause
He had no head. That’s what was really bothering him that morning. He had gone to bed with his head in its usual place, but now it was gone.

ST. FRANCIS I & THOUby Henry Walters
He was easing his hand out to a blushing finch, which hopped away. “How long might it take,” he asked, “for birds to think of me as one of their saints?”

PHOTOGRAPHSby Eleanor Bennett