To her ears southern voices could hardly help sounding warm and friendly. Sometimes a person could be talking mean to her and she still liked listening to him. They could take a normal word and make it sound like a song. Some syllables they made into three times as many sounds as she was used to hearing. How she had fallen in love with the southern accent.
The Small Fruits of New York / Jim Meirose
Beth always liked the Cayuga too, ripping ripping it up with her sharp black claws like she liked that Columbian with the south american accent the small thin mustache and the glass vial of antidote. He carried a forty five under his jacket. It had been used once. It could be used twice. It could be used immeasurable masses of times.
Too Long A Flatulence / B.M.W. Schrapnel, Ph.D.
What prompts the opening spike from Heloise is Creamer's last release, Her Succulence and Wit (Silverfish Editions, 2003), a biography of Lolita Louise Longfellow, a contemporary of nearly everybody in the early to mid 20th Century art and literary world who established herself as a forgotten versifier, portrait painter, and lap dancer "…before anyone knew what hit them."
Puzzles of War / James DeBoer
Beneath the low battlements, Private Cornelius turned up the earth with his pick-axe, where he and several rear-guard privates were working as grave-diggers, packing friends and enemies into the same loathsome hole. "Dig deep because of dogs," a passing captain said, and the men did. The Norman sun made the dead bloat and split open, and like fat puppets with their strings cut they fell drooping into the earth.
My Purple Woman / Deborah Clearman
I'm a guy with a taste for the unusual. Like my woman with the crepe paper body. She claims she wasn't always like this. Her flesh and blood were sucked out of her by some event she won't talk about, leaving her flat and crinkly and purple.
Erika Mikkalo
The Elements That Are the Four Ways of Disposing of the DeadThirteen Anodynes
Robert Cooperman
Amanda Dennehy, Daughter of the Sheriff Who Has Killed a Young Boy: Gold Creek, Colorado TerritoryOrrin Walker Solves a Problem: SomewhereBetween Gold Creek and Tin Cup: The Colorado Territory
James Doyle
The PietaScorpion's Tail
Simon Perchik
D153D167
Stephen Malin
Late Harvest
Jose Marti
The White Rose
Julie Lechevsky
Elegy Written in a Foreign Oil Field
OCTOBER 2003
Suggestions / Scott Nadelson
When she placed in my mind the image of him standing close enough to feel his breath tickling her neck, I immediately thought of you, and the way we huddled close against the wind after lunch yesterday. I should have said to her then that I would look into her complaint further, but still thinking of yesterday afternoon, I mumbled instead "Be grateful."
The Lost Years / Laura M. van den Berg
The place was packed with college age kids, people who had their entire lives in front of them. She watched a boy with purposefully disheveled hair and tattoos pound down a beer. She wondered if he would die young. A girl dressed in a black mini skirt and fishnet stockings was bending over the pool table, tapping her flamingo pink fingernails against the felt surface as she planned her next move.
In A World Full Of Crazy Talk / Irene McGarrity
Whenever there was sex, Laura tended to drift away and think about other things. She went through the list of things she wanted to think about slowly, one at a time. When he said, "God, you're so good at that," there was Bill crossing the street from the Mobil station to Italian Supreme. And when he said, "Would you mind turning over?" she smiled, thinking that now she had new things to put on her list.
Scarecrows / Benjamin Ludwig
Watching his breaths, the boy began to worry that looking for the space between them might lead to actually finding one, and that finding one might make the space last longer than it normally would. And if he made it last long enough, he might actually start to cough and gasp, just like those two boys while they were drowning.
We Are All Dick 3 / Susan Hansell
Jason Ranek
Curriculum For A Minor ProphetIn The Mind Of Autumn
Question
Philip Wexler
BlindAutumn Knowledge
Jonathan Rapp
Essential City
Richard Yatzeck
Leda BloomArt
Barry Ballard
Another LoverIce Storm
Christopher Fox
Disappearing On A Summer MorningMusic
JULY 2003
PROSE
The Girl You Feel Sorry For vs. The Girl You Really Don't Like /
Irene McGarrity
Sheila moved so that she was very close to his face. It was now very clear that she knew Simon. She wouldn't be able to go back to pretending she didn't. Simon had never seen Sheila that close before and he decided that proximity to her face did nothing to change the category she fit into. She was still a girl who wore long dangly earrings and went on planes with a little white head sticking out of a cloth bag.
The Interview / Michael Guista
I hold my breath and gaze at the angels hovering at the corners of the altar. I long for the cool sensation of oxygen in my lungs, but I keep holding my breath until I'm dizzy. Then something happens. I no longer feel the hard wood of the pew. I look down and I'm floating inches above the carpet. People ask me how it feels and when I say peaceful they nod approvingly, knowingly, and drift away.
Adventures In Etymology / B.M.W. Schrapnel, Ph.D.
It must be pointed out that the Gilgamesh epic is the first in a line of anti-environmental works and should have been smashed to powder in its cuneiform stone tablets version thousands of years ago. Not only does Enkidu betray Nature by falling for a human whore and moving to the city, but also he is a partner in crime to one of the most questionable heroic feats of Gilgamesh, the killing of Humbaba, protector of the great cedar forest. I'm told that this is one of George W. Bush's favorite stories.
The Rival / Neal Storrs
There is but one dark cloud looming on the horizon at the moment. Chopin. Even more than most women, she's subject to coming under the spell of those divine harmonies. I'm confident she hasn't made him her lover-yet. But I fear that event may not be far away. I know all too well how incapable she is of resisting the imperious need that takes possession of her senses whenever spring is in the air. She's worse than one of her peasants' field animals.
Lila And The Voodoo / Jim Meirose
Lila sat at the kitchen table in her green and purple bathrobe, with her small brown cardboard box set open before her and with the secret things she kept in the box spread out on the marbled tabletop. She had been lucky to get the things-she was lucky there had been lots of chaos and confusion that day-and she was lucky that getting the things had been a sign from God.
D.L. Stein
Letter GhazalPenelope Refuses To Wear Black
Circe
Entering The Labyrinth
My Favorite Hour
Janet McCann
The Indian Restaurant
Marjorie Power
April WaterfallDancing On The Grave Of Your Words
Simon Perchik
350387
Jonathan Rapp
Red Glacier
Salomon de la Selva
The Bullet