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Poetry by Janel Comeau

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My Hope for You

you will leave him the first time it happens


you’ll be gone by the end of the day 

not into a bed at some shelter 

but moved into your very own place


you will leave him the first time it happens


because somebody taught you the signs

you know it’s the start to a cycle 

and you don’t wait around for next time


you will leave him the first time it happens


you have all the money you need 

you always kept some in your own name

long before you decided to flee


you will leave him the first time it happens


you will pack up the children and go 

and from then on they only know safety

no court sends them back to his home


you will leave him the first time it happens


and you tell everyone why you left 

they never once claim that you’re lying

they all trust that you know him the best


you will leave him the first time it happens


you simply go on with your life 

and it’s everything you ever dreamed of

now that you’re no longer his wife

Janel Comeau is a writer, illustrator, comedian and youth worker currently residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eavesdrop Magazine, Write or Die Magazine, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, The Ana, Ink in Thirds, and several fine anthologies. She is also a regular contributor to the Canadian satire news publication The Beaverton.

Flash fiction by Daniel Addercouth

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Vena Amoris

My grandmother laid her cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand, then picked up a small wooden box that was on her dressing table. She sat down on the massive bed and patted the quilt. I took my place next to her, smelling her familiar scent of smoke mixed with talcum powder, and watched in fascination as she opened the box. Nested in purple velvet was a silver ring with three diamonds in a delicate casing.

 “This is my engagement ring, Cordula,” she said. “One day, it will be yours. When you get engaged.” 

She placed the ring on the fourth finger of my left hand. The band was loose on my nine-year-old’s finger, and the metal felt cool where it touched the skin. “This is your ring finger.” She traced the pale underside of my digit. “A vein runs from here to your heart.” 

I turned my hand to examine the ring from different angles, thinking how pretty the rainbows would look on my white dress.


When I got engaged, I wanted my grandmother to be the first to know. My heart swelled with joy as I drove to her house. The sunlight burst through the leaves of the trees arching across the road, as if the world wanted to bless our pledge. 

“Who’s the lucky fellow?” my grandmother asked as she served Darjeeling from a china pot.

“It’s a woman, actually. Nicola. She’s training to be a doctor.” “How wonderful,” she said, after a pause so slight I wondered if I’d imagined it. She transferred her cigarette to her other hand so she could clutch my arm. “We must celebrate.”

 I waited for her to mention the ring. But when I left, three cups of tea and a glass of real champagne later, the walnut box was still on her dressing table.


I was busy preparing for my PhD defence when my grandmother got ill, and I didn’t visit as often as I should have. But Nicola had developed an unlikely affection for the old lady during our occasional visits, and made the hour’s drive from our university city to see her whenever she could. When I came with her, I watched as she changed my grandmother’s dressings and helped her go to the bathroom. I couldn’t have done it. I shuddered whenever I glimpsed the coin-sized lumps through her thin white hair. Nicola said the ones on her back were worse. “It’s in her blood.” But Nicola did what needed to be done without hesitation; that was one of the reasons I loved her. It was Nicola who cleaned up my grandmother when diarrhoea stained the bed, and it was Nicola who persuaded the nurses to install a morphine drip when the pain made her cry out.

One afternoon, Nicola and I were sitting by the bedside in silence. The only sound was my grandmother’s strained breathing. The smell of disinfectant mingled with the stale reek of the cigarettes that she refused to give up. My grandmother no longer had the energy to speak. She’d lost so much weight she looked tiny in the huge bed with its stained quilt. “It’s her time,” the nurse told us in a low voice. “But she won’t let go.” 

 We’d been sitting there for a while when my grandmother said something to Nicola, so quietly that Nicola asked her to repeat it. With a great effort, my grandmother lifted her stick of an arm to point at the walnut box on her dressing table. “Give me that.” 

Nicola looked mystified. “Go ahead,” I whispered. Nicola fetched the box and tried to give it to my grandmother, but she closed her hand around Nicola’s wrist.

“I want you to have this.” Her voice was barely audible. “You deserve it.”

She laid back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her breathing became heavy, then she let out a massive sigh and became very still. When Nicola bent over and pressed her fingers to my grandmother’s neck, I realised she was gone.

Nicola and I held each other for a long time. When she pulled away, I assumed she was going to call the doctor or take care of one of a hundred other practicalities. But instead I felt her slip something onto my finger. I traced the smooth contours of the three diamonds. I was tempted to keep it, but I knew it wasn’t mine.

I took the ring off and put it on Nicola’s finger, feeling her soft skin. “She wanted you to have it.” I held her hand and rocked it slightly from side to side, watching the diamonds sparkle, and imagined how it would cast rainbows on her dress on our wedding day. 

Daniel Addercouth (@ruralunease) grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Germany. His work has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset and HAD, among other places. His story “The Good Prizes” was included in Best Small Fictions 2024.

Flash fiction by Kendra Cardin

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Wish You Were Here

Sam surrenders a few more uncrumpled dollar bills to the kid behind the counter at the fish bowl toss booth. Third time’s a charm, right? Tongue bitten between their teeth, unruly bangs brushed clear of their coal-lined eyes, Sam casts one plastic ping-pong ball after another toward the game table. Ping, ping, each bounces, hopscotching along the rims of the little glass bowls. Ping, ping — plop, onto the ground, while the goldfish continue to swim their cramped laps.

Final go. The winking mermaid inked on Sam’s forearm swishes when they flex their wrist. A slight pang of arthritis before the toss, then ping, ping — bloop. Sam punches their fist into the air, glossy black painted fingernails reflecting the razzle-dazzle of the fairground lights. The carnival kid scoops the floating ball out of the bowl, brings Sam their prize. Round and round swims the orange fish.

Sam’s been working the festival circuit for years, cramming amps and boxes full of band merch into the back of their clunky van, delivering their one-hit wonder to corn dog munchers and Ferris wheel enthusiasts up and down the sunshine state.

Sam doesn’t resent The Song anymore. Not when sweaty clusters of fans smile widely, dance wildly, when Sam starts to play. Especially during the evening set. Sun low, heat breaking. Kids and grandparents, taffy-spun teens, all shoulder to shoulder as they bop, twirl like tilt-a-whirls. This weekend’s appearance, a bevy of beach babes. Flip-flopped feet strolling the boardwalk. A sweet slice of paradise, just a hop away from the town where Sam grew up.

Sam lifts the bowl to their eyes, grins at the gaping fish, feels a twinge of guilt. If they weren’t on the road all the time, they could get a proper home for the finned critter. Maybe one of those fancy aquariums. The kind with the multi-colored pebbles lining the bottom, miniature castles, and treasure chests whose lids open with an eruption of bubbles. Then goldie could get as big as it wanted. Sam would feed it flakes, scrub its tank, make sure it had everything its swimming heart needed to thrive.

Yeah.

And if they settled down, maybe they could look up Susie. She loved carnivals. Sam scans the crowd of bobbing heads and neon-hued balloons, half expecting to see her. Shaggy blonde hair, sea-blue eyes glittered by the midway bulb light, crunching on a gooey caramel apple as she pirouettes around the cakewalk. Of course, she’s not there. Sam wonders if they’d even recognize her now. It’d been decades since that night at the drive-in. Forty was coming fast for both of them. And they weren’t minnows anymore.

It’s a sherbet twilight, sky a swirl of pink and orange, when Sam takes the stage again at six. Still thinking of Susie. Kicking themselves for never finishing that song they started writing for her in high school. Sam plucks a string on their guitar, slides smooth and cool as snow cone syrup into the first notes of The Song. Out in the audience, disciples raise their arms high, roller-coastered, ready to catch the melody. Novices shuffle, nod along, ears attuning to something new, paper plates of half-eaten funnel cake cradled in their hands.

If Sam were to walk away from all of this tomorrow, that fish might stand a chance. The thought bounces around — ping,ping — before falling away, quick as it came, when Sam begins to sing. Balanced atop a spare amp backstage, the goldfish darts back and forth, dizzying itself in its small bowl, blissfully unaware of all the potential it has to grow.

Kendra Cardin creates a safe harbor for herself with poetry and storytelling. Her writings have been featured in a variety of publications including those of Rough Diamond Poetry, Sídhe Press, Blink-Ink, Little Thoughts Press, and Black Bough Poetry.

Micro fiction by LM Fontanes

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Undead

Hi John, not that your name is John but in case someone ever finds this, plausible deniability that I didn’t destroy your life even though I might have. Maybe destroy is harsh. Also, maybe your life or, no, our life together needed to be destroyed. It’s funny how life can keep going like a zombie that hasn’t tasted salt. That’s what happens when you give salt to resurrected corpses. They remember they’re dead and return to their graves. At least, that’s what I recall from Caribbean horror stories I devoured in college. If Daddy knew I’d been reading those, he would’ve dragged me to Confession in his lumbering Pontiac. I once asked about the power of island curses and his veiny brown hand flew to the scapular under his Sears & Roebuck undershirt. I still have that ancient badge of faith—plastic cracked over Jesus and His Sacred Heart—but I no longer have Daddy or you, John. No zombies involved.

Or wait. Maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe it wasn’t us, maybe it was me. I remember the So Cal night I slashed our Navajo White walls with my hunger. How I stayed out until past the owl’s hunting time in the company of someone not you. Later, in the baleful canyon beyond our condo door, I thought I heard something shriek. You never see the raptor coming. It must be better that way, John. 

In the morning, I licked salt from the mirror and remembered I was alive.

LM Fontanes is a multi-racial, multi-genre storyteller who writes, teaches & leads. Words in/upcoming Roi Fainéant, Frazzled Lit, Silly Goose Press, Emerge Literary, 100-Foot Crow, JAKE, 34 Orchard, Flash Fiction Festival Anthology, Thomasonian, The Willowherb Review, and long-listed for The Smokey Award and the Frazzled Lit short story prize. 

Poetry by Bart Edelman

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Inventory

Hammer toe.

Twisted ankle.

Weak knee.

Bum leg.

Dislocated hip.

Fractured finger.

Swollen wrist.

Bad back.

Frozen shoulder.

Strained neck.

Wired jaw.

Black tongue.

Inflamed gum.

Crooked tooth.

Broken nose.

Lazy eye.

Deaf ear.

Oily scalp.

Jumbled brain.

Latest inventory.

Random sample.

More to come.

In good health—

By all measure.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023.  He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.  His work has been anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others.  He lives in Pasadena, California.

Resurgence (6)

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Poetry by Zadie McGrath

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It’s not like a city wants to be a city anyway


it is the memory coming back : a basilisk unfolding

in the trenches of the earth, how we bend

around a word : an incantation.


see : night has polluted to pastels

we want to make a city on the moon see :

we stargaze already

for satellites.


it’s not like a city : wants to be a city anyway.

we take the sea

where we can get it,

ocean-scraped leavings and the roadside

is pedestrian is a storm victim see :

this city a feat

a freak : of nature.


i tried to write a fury poem and instead i wrote overwhelm and the hum of the air by the roadside.

i burned my hair on six hours sleep and it should’ve been enough.

i would go away, i said, guilty.

i sat roadside on the least road a road could be,

dug through landfill just to see :

retina on screen,

see : sand billowing

onto the concrete overstory,

the back end of things,

the basilisk unfolding

in subway tunnels, in charted ocean.

i met the basilisk seaside, roadside and it told me

see : you defy yourself.

Zadie McGrath is a student writer from San Francisco. Among other places, their poetry has been published in Apprentice Writer, Backwards Trajectory, and boats against the current. They love fantastical stories, and there’s a good chance that they are thinking of one as you read this.

Poetry by Rick K. Reut

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(TIME MACHINE)

…of time in places where

that time stands still or flies

around like fireflies 

in the neon night air.

Your memory is a time

machine taking you back

to the scene of each crime

you’ve committed in black

and white. You go to sleep

before you begin to dream

about all you did deep

in the past. It may seem

like you are looking back

to see someone like you

talk to someone you knew

once again. There’s a track…

…of time in places where that time stands still or flies around like fireflies in the neon night air. Your memory is a time machine taking you back to the scene of each crime you’ve committed in black and white. You go to sleep before you begin to dream about all you did deep in the past. It may seem like you are looking back to see someone like you talk to someone you knew once again. There’s a track…


Special note: The piece is an example of what the author calls cyclic verse, which presupposes a poem having no beginning or end and working in both rhyme and prose. A portion of it was previously published in Active Muse.

Rick K. Reut was born in 1984. He studied philosophy at EHU in Minsk, Belarus, and Vilnius, Lithuania, and literature at SPSU in Saint Petersburg, Russia. For most of his life after graduation, he has worked as a translator and a tutor of English as a foreign language.

Flash fiction by Judy Darley

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Bluespot Ray 

Their second date was at an aquarium where a green turtle swam with lemon sharks. She picked the setting. Her friends said it was a safe choice where they could make small talk while oceans lapped in tanks.

Small talk didn’t interest her – what she wanted was deep dives where the only light came from biofluorescence. 

She’d once seen a nature documentary about wafting sea creatures glimmering quietly far from the sun’s rays. She imagined it would be like drowsing in the warmth of someone’s arms while the day unfurled behind drawn curtains.

On their first date in the coffee shop he’d told her his favorite color: blue, and then listed his preferred shades: cobalt, Egyptian blue, ultramarine.

She waited for him to ask her favorite color, but the question never came.

“My birth stone is aquamarine,” she said, and he blinked as though she’d interrupted the current of his thoughts.

“Why would you even see him again?” her friends asked, and she shrugged. 

When they’d exited the coffee shop into a downfall, he opened an umbrella and held it above them. She’d caught herself noticing how his dark hair shone with stray droplets.

They walked together to the bus stop and he waited with her until the bus arrived. His body blocked the breeze whistling through the shelter’s broken window. They stood together in a pool of silence that felt warm despite the afternoon’s chill. 

When she boarded the bus and the vehicle pulled out, she watched him watch her leave.

No one had been that careful with her since she left her childhood home. The instinctiveness of his kindness moved her.

At the aquarium he was in his element, naming fish species with a joy that seemed almost reverent. In the glow of the Great Barrier Reef tank, she wove her fingers through his. He jumped at her touch, but then smiled down at her and asked: “Which is your favorite?” 

She thought of the pinktail triggerfish that had caught her eye, but pointed instead to the bluespot ray. “This one.”

He looked at her intently and she couldn’t read his gaze. “Did you know these rays are loners? The blue spots warn other fish to keep their distance.”

“Oh? But they’re so pretty they make me want to come closer.” She squeezed his hand and stood on tiptoe so they were nearly the same height, almost eye-to-eye.

Judy Darley is a fiction writer, journalist and brand engagement manager living by England’s North Somerset coast. She is the author of short fiction collections ‘The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain‘ (Reflex Press), ‘Sky Light Rain‘ (Valley Press) and ‘Remember Me to the Bees‘ (Tangent Books). Her words have been shared on BBC radio, aboard boats and on coastal paths, as well as in museums, caves and a deconsecrated church. She is currently working on a short fiction collection and a hybrid memoir beast she’s not sure how to describe. 

Find Judy at https://bsky.app/profile/judydarley.bsky.social

Flash fiction by Kevin Hogg

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Called Upward

I really appreciate the invitation. Getting some exercise will be a good distraction from thinking about her.

I’m happy to have the company. So, it’s been hard to get out?

It’s hard to do anything. I’m seeing reminders everywhere.

I’m certainly open to helping tidy the house and put away some of the…reminders.

I just can’t escape them. Even that cloud over there looks like one of the Easter lilies that she loved.

Right. I remember the arrangement at the funeral. She would have loved it.

Yeah, she would…

I’m sorry it’s been so tough. Maybe we should make this a regular thing—you know, a weekly hike.

* * *

This is some workout. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like this.

If it’s too much, we can stop here. There are some easier hikes nearby to choose from.

No, I’m enjoying it. I’ll just need a few breaks along the way.

Anytime you like. There’s some shade just ahead.

Thanks. Maybe a quick rest and some water.

It’s a beautiful view even from here.

Definitely. More pictures in the clouds, too. That one reminds me of the dog she had when we started dating.

Cute. What was its name?

That was Tater.

Oh, I remember Tater. You had him for a few years after you married, right?

Yeah, a fun little guy. Slept at the foot of the bed every night. Anyhow, we should probably keep walking.

* * *

You still doing okay?

Yeah, I’m good. A hot day, but I’m sure the endorphins are a good thing.

One of my favorite parts of hiking. I’ve gotten a bit hooked on that feeling.

Well, I’d love to do this more often. Oh, there comes a bit of a breeze.

Yeah, that should help cool down.

And it’s blowing in some clouds. That’ll block a bit of the sun. And it even looks like Trinidad.

Have you been there?

Yeah, that was our honeymoon. Lots of fun memories of exploring the island…

* * *

Whew. That was some climb. But you made it!

I guess so. Thanks for being flexible with the pace.

No problem. Actually, we made pretty good time.

I might find a spot to rest for a bit before we head back down.

There’s no rush. We should enjoy the reward after that hike. And there’s a log book to sign.

That cloud looks like a staircase.

A what?

A staircase.

Oh, that’s fun. Want me to sign both of our names?

Right beside the mountain, like she’s calling me up to her…

Pardon?

…

Okay, I signed it.

…

Where’d you go? Oh my gosh, you didn’t fall, did you? No, there’s nothing there. Hello?

…

What’s going on? There aren’t any trees. There’s nothing up here…

…

Except the staircase. You’ve done it, haven’t you?

…

I guess if anyone could climb the clouds, it would be you. You two deserve to be together forever. Farewell, my friend.

Kevin Hogg is a high school teacher and forest therapy guide in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains. He loves forest walks, viewpoint hikes, and cloud formations. His website is https://kevinhogg.ca.

Credits

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The ice in all the photographs in this issue was the work of nature but the vividness below seems to be the work of this person. With appreciation for brightness that shows through even the thickest hurling covering.

Contributors:

Daniel Addercouth, Madeleine Armstrong, Pam Avoledo, Sudha Balagopal, Karen Baumgart, Joyce Bingham, Kendra Cardin, Janel Comeau, CS Crowe, Judy Darley, Darren C. Demaree, Bart Edelman, LM Fontanes, Seán Hill, Kevin Hogg, Matthew Jakubowski, Zadie McGrath, Emma Phillips, Oliver Reimers, Rick K. Reut, Kevin A. Risner, Al Russell, Mario Senzale, Federica Silvi, Sumitra Singam, Betty Stanton, Alison Wassell, Huina Zheng.

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