Spider by Jessica Taylor

Jessica lives in Southern California. She spends her time attending college, inhaling science fiction, and trapping insects under glassware.

The Common Flag by Tim Morris

i don't think that way
my mind isn't wired that way
so fuck you and get out of my face

blah, blah, blah...
the mantra
of the moment

i hold no interest in origins
no fascination for
outcomes
what concerns me is the path
and how one walks
among its bricks & brambles
and the blisters that result

and the trees
who hold all the answers
in their pursed fragile lips
pried open only by frogs
who kiss them just so
but now they're beholden
only to the shades who carry
the common flag

Tim Morris lives with his wife and two daughters in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains on their estate, Withering Cedars, in Northwest Georgia. Tim holds a degree in Creative Writing from the University of South Alabama and currently teaches high school literature. When asked, he calls his poetic style "realistic romantic surrealism".

Innuendo by David Blaine

Innuendo

Someone has had his
eye
on my money

forever

he's seen everyone
I've ever paid off

this man's out back
his straightjacket's
black

but he's the sanest sonofabitch
In here

I ask him why he's laughing

locked up out of sight
and he says

I've got your number.


Collage: Medusa by David Blaine

Read more by David Blaine at

"A. Hello Whiskey."

David Blaine:

Has not been nominated for a Pushcart
Has never traveled to Paris or Pamplona
Nor been awarded an MFA degree
He hasn't been published in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review
Or Ploughshares
David doesn't get a birthday card
From Scribner or Norton
Donald Hall did write to him once
David didn't send the money

Personal Rituals by Miss E.

Personal rituals. The things we hold onto that keep us from never having been.

There are days which blend into a sameness, where half-forgotten things crawl, gather, and a vague restlessness chokes the air. The eyes go blind. The fingers grasp for yellow straws of normalcy. Whatever normal means.

I mute my screams and photoshop my memories.

I need to breathe again.

I love dance. The studio, the music, filling the emptiness within, without. The old, familiar aches of the back, neck, the bruises on the shin and ankle. Etching the song into space with the lines of the body. I live pain, without its suffering. I take pleasure, despite its bitter reality.

Somewhere, a cage sits silent. And a broken-winged bird died, dreaming of flight.

The music flows, whispering life into rose-leaf memories and stillborn futures.
The emptiness, it becomes a channel.

Expression?
Catharsis.

For the things beyond words, the body speaks for me.

And in that heartbeat between notes, within songs.

I burn once more.

Personal Ritual by Crystal Folz

Long before she bought her first pair of fishnets and rolled down the waistband on her skirts to raise the hemline, there was a nakedness in her eyes like swollen blackberries on a leaf-barren vine.

She looked for it in other people, touching strangers' arms in passing to lure a glance and thumbing the brows over young eyes soggy with whiskey, until one night, there was a wicked dance between the conversationalists in her head that lasted well into morning.

Her ugliness was unique.

She wore it in embarrassment, like stained panties, discreetly, always glimpsing behind to ensure invisibility. She tried to calm the pain by holding in her stomach. Jutted hipbones, concave stomach, fleshless between her thighs, she fumbled around like a skeleton, a skeleton with bulging ugly eyes.

Crystal Folz lives in rural Indiana with her husband and two sons. She works as a bookkeeper for a small Carnegie library.