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Nightfall
by Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
translated by Jacqueline Michaud
The sun slept this evening in clouds of mounting gray / Tomorrow will bring the storm, and evening, and night
Waves
by William Ogden Haynes
That bowl, whose waves long ago gently caressed / the scent of Sunday dinners, finally washed up / in the swampy cul-de-sac of my kitchen counter.
Lilac
by Alexis Misko
I feel the kind of sticky / I should feel if this were Georgia, / if I were in an Alice Walker novel / with a fist full of blackberries / staining my southern grin.
How to Pay Respects to a Serial Killer
by Robert S. King
Follow the script and the scripture. / Even the biography of the damned / is told with sobbing compassion.
Orchard Avocation
by William Ford
I’m a laid off mooch / of a prof using up fuel / to cut grass close / around apple trees / where voles eat roots / and breed and breed / deep in the grass, hidden / from fox and hawks.
A Proof
by Andrew McCall
My father does not believe / That the small things accrete, / That the infinitesimals / Lean together to form a whole.
Give Me Your Wife
by Tony Hoagland
because / I like her. I like / the signs of wear on her; / the way her breasts have dropped a little with the years; / the weathered evidence of joy around her eyes.
Bessie Arrowood’s Circle of Life
by Karen Paul Holmes
There she goes again, spinning / her wheelchair ’round the nursing home. / Two years, five thousand laps. So far.
Goldfish
by Lisa Cihlar
Does it matter that a migrating tern / is standing in the Fox River / with a goldfish in its beak? / The tern is a Caspian with a lovely black head / like the back-combed Italian mobsters in old movies.
This Isn’t Silverlake Anymore
by Neil McCarthy
I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from / the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight, / applause erupting like hailstones on a corrugated iron roof.
It all began around a campfire…
Beautiful language
is meant to be heard as well as read, and in fact words were vocalized eons before they were ever committed to clay or parchment. Storytelling began around campfires. We seek prose and poetry that continue the tradition.
Contributor Spotlight:
Love and Hot Chicken
by Mary Liza Hartong
Open Contests
by Stephen Parrish, with the editors of The Lascaux Review