What Made Me Cry...

It wasn’t your lifeless body accompanied by sympathy cards and my childhood stuffed animal, not your workplace name tag displayed in your shirt pocket, not the sermon praising your altruism, not the incense that uplifted our prayers, not as a pallbearer guiding you to your resting place.

It was the blasts of a three-volley salute followed by the silence of two soldiers that lifted the flag off your casket and with precision folded it into a perfect triangle, and my realization that if you didn’t survive war and didn’t start a family, I wouldn’t be standing here missing you, Dad.

From Guest Contributor Charles Gray

For Yulia Navalnaya

Beware, murderer. I know widows. I watched my mother become one, imagined how my face would bend and darken in the shadow of the word that means shroud, dusk, ash. What lies inside the bones of a woman who does not crumble before you—who wears this word to war, vowing not to yield? Something heavy: iron, redwoods. Oak, like him: an oak among reeds who knew he would be uprooted, just as she knows she will be. No, it is light, hydrogen fusion in the belly of a star, howling life, dawn, freedom. Beware of this widow on fire.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook Bhagat (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

Drunk

First, there's a moment when you are just crossing the threshold from complete oblivion, wrapped in blankets and darkness, to reemerge into the light of the living. You are not a person yet. You have no recollections or anxieties. This is probably what it was like right before you were born.

You don't realize you have a hole in your memory until you're halfway to the bathroom. How did you get home last night? Where's your car? Why is the floor slanting away from you?

You stare at yourself in the mirror and promise you're never going to drink again.

Weightlifting

When he first started pushing barbells, he did it to get his anger out, throwing the weights from his body, stressing his tendons as he exhaled sprays of spit with every red-faced repetition, every sweaty pump. He realized his joints wouldn’t last long hurling metal, so he calmed his approach, traded manic intervals – of fighting gravity with fury – for calculated precision, and he’d demonstrate, lying down on a chair with an invisible bar connecting his fists, showing us the proper form of a barbell press, his big forearms and biceps flexing and twisting slowly as his muscles contracted, then extended.

From Guest Contributor Parker Wilson

Parker is a writer and editor living in Highland Park. He is a recent MFA graduate and spends his free time running along the Detroit River. He’s published in Bristol Noir and is a founding editor at DUMBO Press.

Instagram:@parkerreviewsbooks

The Wait

I woke up early and went for a jog. As I followed the path through the park, I listened to nature. The sounds of the birds singing, and the squirrels running up trees were a sign of early spring. It was an unusually hot day in March, so the park benches were filled with people. I had water in my pouch and took a sip. It felt good going down into the pit of my stomach.

After, I sat I checked my phone. There it was, the message I had been waiting for.

My first novel was accepted for publication.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Leviathan

April worked the shop counter, gritting through the arthritis and the insinuations, hoping her obsolete wedding ring would ward off anything worse. Her smile was too often seen as an invitation, but her popularity with the customers meant her paycheck was one less thing she had to fret over. Plus she got free repairs.

In winter, when she was locking up after dark, she noticed the shadows piled up in the corners of the lot despite the reflected fluorescence. Something was out there waiting for her, waiting for her to be buried under debt and trauma, waiting to consume her.

Death Sentence

“Stay,” I commanded, my palm facing him.

He dropped to his belly, those big brown eyes looking up at me. Our gaze hung for a moment, lovingly. He was my only friend, and I, his only master.

I grabbed the package and headed to the meeting point. That’s when I heard the sirens. Four years for distribution, the judge decided, as it was my first offense. It would have been life if they’d found the warehouse.

Four years tougher, I returned. There, just as I left him, was Julian. Emaciated and still. The most loyal gimp I ever did have.

From Guest Contributor Liam Kerry

After Summer Camp

We hugged our children when they stepped off the bus, but they looked at us with vacant eyes, and when they spoke, the music was missing. They didn’t know who we were, or what they were doing on this street where they’d grown up. We brought out the brownies they loved, but they said no, our precious fifth graders, and stacked their suitcases up like a funeral pyre, as if to set fire to their childhood. The bus driver stood on the corner, a new god, calling them back to their new life, while we were left to wave goodbye.

From Guest Contributor Linda Lowe

You Are Fine As You Are

With your failures your fears your wrong body your clutter your stains your dirty mind and the night you can’t take back and what you shouldn’t have said out loud and what you should’ve said but couldn’t didn’t because you were afraid selfish angry shy and the thing they said that you can’t forget and maybe it is true and the wreck the ruins so much wasted time and you didn’t even call and the way you looked at her even though you knew even after even now and even with those horrible Crocs

you are fine as you are.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

Policy Of Truth

At age 16, Brenda promised she would only tell the truth. She had always detested lies, even little white ones, and felt sick when forced to feign compliments. Even worse, when she found out she'd been lied to after the fact, she especially hated being told it was out of a desire to save her feelings. Sounded more like an excuse to avoid a hard conversation.

Brenda found honesty liberating in many ways, including the shedding of former friendships. But the best part had to be how much she enjoyed justifying her innate cruelty by her commitment to total veracity.