Changing Planes at Idlewild

My wife and I are on board a large plane. We land safely, but harshly, on an empty street. We are connecting to an overseas flight at Idlewild. This is not Idlewild. It is a small town. Many people deplane at their destination. The plane moves through narrow streets, wingtips nearly hitting streetlights and the like. We are looking for a runway. I am getting nervous about the time.

“When does our plane leave?” I ask my wife.

“The time gets shorter each time the clock is turned back,” she says.

The pilot leaves the plane. We follow him out. The three of us haul the plane down the street toward a downward slope that sweeps upward, helping the plane ascend. Behind us, the plane is shrinking. As we start downhill, the plane rolls ahead of us. Almost out of sight, it swerves onto a pier and splashes into the water.

My wife and I hurry to the dock where the pilot is swimming in the nude, playing with the plane, now the size of a football. He pushes it through the water, just below the surface, a submarine with wings.

My wife and I begin to undress.

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared or will appear in Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Chautauqua, and has garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. He holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from UIC and lives northwest of Chicago.

Arrival of Destination

From a skinny girl glimpsed
through a fog of dingy college bar
she closes in and clarifies
grows into subject and object
of all his senses
forsakes, with him, imagination
for the marriage of minds
the making of Home with bare hands
the animal work of bodies
the daunting sobriety
of giving lives over
to the service of happiness

Dan Carpenter is a freelance journalist, poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger, residing in Indianapolis, and has published poems, stories, and essays in Laurel Review, Poetry East, Illuminations, Pearl, Xavier Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Dan has also published two books of poems, The Art He’d Sell for Love (Cherry Grove, 2015) and More Than I Could See (Restoration, 2009), and two books of non-fiction.

The Cadaver Bone Graft in My Mouth Speaks

Bite the inside cheek when cast-off memories
of what’s-left-undone boomerang back and leak
into the skull’s cavities like a busted well.
Rhizomes, breaking through bricks, refuse to take root
or give solace. Lie in an open field still fresh from tilling.

Die from infarction, a cold heart cracked
by water from a hot tap. Suffer infection
with curt words, like sepsis coursing
through capillaries, touching every cell.
Lie in windless snow beneath a copse of pines.

Lie on stainless steel. Consider each meal the last,
not knowing if it has time to fully digest or will be
picked apart in autopsy, revealing recent history.
Before that, lie in a canal blooming with willow tufts.
Be purified, after being putrefied, after being petrified.

David A. Goodrum, writer/photographer, lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in Tar River Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Passengers Journal, Scapegoat Review, Wild Roof Journal, Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. Additional work (poetry and photography) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Leaning Forward

Cully fought her way up the steep hill, attacked at every step by thick alder bushes bent from last winter’s snow. Clumps of prickly Devil’s Club and patches of stinging Cow Parsnip cautioned “danger, retreat.”

She didn’t listen.

Her fiancé waited for her over the next rise. He’d shown her his route on the map before he launched his Cessna 180. She blinked against the stinging sweat dripping off her forehead. In her mind, she saw his wide cowboy smile as he kneeled before her, placing his ring on her finger.

She was out of breath and water by the time she arrived but knew it was the place from the shredded trees and plane debris. She leaned forward.

Then fell.

She’d found him.

Alaskan author Lynne Curry has published four short stories, the most recent in 2022 (After Dinner Conversations) and 2021 (101 Words) and six books, including Navigating Conflict and Managing for Accountability  (BEP), Beating the Workplace Bully (AMACOM) and Solutions. She publishes a weekly “dear Abby of the workplace” newspaper column and in her www.workplacecoachblog (2525 subscribers). 

Cordelia M. Hanemann, writer and artist, currently co-hosts Summer Poets, a poetry critique group in Raleigh, NC. Professor emerita retired English professor, she conducts occasional poetry workshops and is active with youth poetry in the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is also a botanical illustrator and lover of all things botanical. She has published in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Laurel Review, and California Quarterly and numerous others; in several anthologies including best-selling Poems for the Ukraine and her chapbook. Her poems have been performed by the Strand Project, featured in select journals, won awards, and been nominated for Pushcarts. She is now working on a novel about her Cajun roots. 

Hours after My Grandfather’s Funeral

I swung arm over arm
at a light pole. My hands
came away in gashes.

A spider’s web landed
on my sleeve, and I caught
the spider in my palm, put
an end to its spiral down

from light. Simple things.
I was not fighting. The rain
was a small one.

The spider crept
up my arm, gathered a strand
of its fallen web,
another, rounded them into a ball.
I counted the seconds

between lightning strikes, counted
poles lining the street.
Lit windows changed colors,
I counted those.

The spider moved
back to my palm. I closed
my fingers softly, walked home.

There, my car was still running,
headlights still yellow
globes on my garage door,
dingy, flickering.

I lifted the spider to my porch light.
It caught the fixture
and found a hole to hide in.

Through the door, mail
I wouldn’t open. The television
gave news to an empty chair.

My shudders alone with the walls,
coping with the walls, simple things.
A shower. So much hot in all this
cold. So many faces mourning, me

without a face to come home to.
I cut a handful of hair
from my head, another, balled it up.

I dropped it all at my feet, left it
floating. I went back to find the spider,
but the spider had gone. One faint

strand of web hung from the porch light.
Simple things. There was rain,

but the sky couldn’t fall fast enough.
The world has never slowed down.
I never knew him. I never cared to try.

Brian D. Morrison completed his MFA at the University of Alabama, where he was an assistant editor at Black Warrior Review. His poetry has appeared at West Branch, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, and other venues. Currently, he works as an Associate Teaching Professor of English at Ball State University.