Flying Island

Old Pictures Nothing says death like old pictures, grey on grey, their subjects stiff as plaster casts in Pompeii, blank stares fixed on eternity— like caryatids bearing the world’s entablature. I wonder,  how long can the living hold that pose before an itch, a sneeze, maybe just boredom smears them into ghosts? And here I am, rummaging boxes, holding a picture up to the light: James, John says the faded ink on the back.  That you’ve no idea who they might be matters not at all.  You’ve shared that thousand mile stare borne the monumental weight of longing, breathed with them the ashen air. Richard Spilman was born and raised in Normal, Illinois, half a block from Main Street, in a house that backed onto Sugar Creek. He has not lived in Normal for quite a while, but it follows him everywhere.

Motherland   See her there, on her ninety-fifth birthday  in her kitchen   nested in her knickknacks,  commemorating dead royals, cats     behind her  a row of clean knives that yearn for meat that must learn to live with ready meals  the occasional touch of a lean tomato  plastic flowers in dustless glassware, that   have pulled themselves to deathless attention    She is the survivor in his pinnacle of bloom of cluttered complicated room  In which she lives   she is beyond career, family, lovers proud, disinterested in her nudging oblivion.   She is the hand of a clock,  turning forward, turning back  with one true function, that she is perfect for  to follow the day, memorialise each   moment  show me how to live  there,  one of the ancients, walking with precision  on cold kitchen tile in her bright blue shoes.   A...

Poop-Smellin’ Tree I wonder if it was a joke she meant to play on me, the poop-smellin’ tree, planted by Lydia too close to our front yard Maple (said the neighbor) for both to thrive. I complained in public enough that someone offered to take it down for me; in truth it smelt of semen, the flowering funk of human seed come to fertilize my dour front yard each spring. When we divorced, she left, I kept the house, but once months after, she walked around it and the perimeter of the backyard fence touching things, snatching The bloom from the single-rose bush, banging on siding, wanting it,  if no longer hers, then ruined. Was she planted too close to me?  Did she harvest herself one sorry night  so I’d thrive like the Maple, still standing, Whirring its helicopter seeds into the cracked driveway, hopeful that its sad little babies might take root and grow, like the babies we made together took root to grow,  passing beyond her, each spring? Steve Henn is the author o...

Golden Shovel for Carl Sandburg Greed resembling the hue of a hog, bright in rosiness, plump for the butcher. And his calculated slaughter. For reams of notes the slips spinning out of world travelled boxes made with tool by a secret maker. While the stacker folds slips of names in wheat colored ink. The player emboldened with the greenest running lies down railroads of half-truths and ambiguities. The  words seeping into nation’s  psyche. Weary of the freight of life. Eager for a new handler, but stormy is the path. Husky are the lies, brawling in the piss-filled city streets. Corruption now of  several generations. The machine grinding on big gears, constantly oiled with cracked hands and weary shoulders. Shontay Luna majored in Poetry at Columbia College, Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Olney Magazine , Umbrella Factory Magazine , EKL Review and The Crucible and elsewhere. Her most recent book is The Goddess Journal: A Tool For Unlocking The Goddess Within ...

Dear Flying Island Readers: Welcome to the 2.28 Edition of the Flying Island Journal! In this edition we publish poems by Jonathan S Baker , Angela Jackson-Brown , Norbert Krapf , and  Jason Ryberg . Inspired to send us your fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction? For more info on how to submit, see the tab above. Thank you for reading, Flying Island Editors and Readers

III Poems from a Stormy Evening after the storm’s peak                          tossing earth and walls passed leaving a snail’s trail                gleaming furrow carved  white and shades of gray                    their empty heads rang screaming and moaning               crying over missing persons behind the dark horizon               where strangers live and die there was only quiet                          in rooms beneath stones except for our breathing           sharing damp air over raw lips bodies shining damp              falling limp slack deeply relaxed  she held me in her arms            ...

Butterfly Wings No one sang me lullabies. Cradled in a splintered crib, I was lulled to sleep  by the sound of my own silent cries. My lips were sewn shut – stitched  in awkward zigzags. I ripped those stitches wide, my mouth becoming a perfectly shaped O. Butterflies tried to flutter from my mouth  even though their flesh still tasted of caterpillar. I tried to vomit them out, but they were one with my tongue. Maybe that is why they had time for a metamorphosis.  Too bad I missed mine – there I was – a baby  with little to no chance of gaining my butterfly wings, too. Angela Jackson-Brown is the author of the award-winning poetry collection House Repairs and five novels. In addition to her creative work, she serves as an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, and as a member of the graduate faculty at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University. Her dual roles as educator and writer continually inspire her expl...

Winter on the Blues Trail I’m on the Mississippi Blues Trail with my wife Katherine and we go to Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale to listen to Jimmy “Duck” Holmes. Katherine perceives that Anthony Bourdain is there also enjoying himself so she moves her chair closer to him and he smiles. She loves cooking Cajun and maybe she tells him so and he smiles more. The great lover of foods in so many places seems also to love the blues in Red’s Juke Joint. Some years after our Winter Blues Trail trip is over our daughter, who married a Franconian in Germany and loves to cook calls us, all upset with the news that Bourdain took his life. So sad, but I’m glad we saw him savoring the red-hot blues in such a friendly place as Red’s where so many people are very happy to be and thoroughly enjoy Red’s grilled meat and the red hot blues of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and the whole night was so memorable and my iPhone caught Anthony smiling while my wife sat near him. But, sadly, the blues could not keep him...