For The Record

“She was attractive. Cute face.”

“Facts, please,” the officer cringed, pausing his pen.

“Black-rimmed glasses, plum lipstick and...”

“What was stolen?”

“My cellphone. One minute in my hand. The next, gone.”

A woman was called to the counter by the second officer on duty.

“Reporting a theft,” she announced. “Thief had salt and pepper hair.”

“What was taken?”

“My cellphone.”

The officers compared the complainants with the details given.

“You two realize making false claims is an offence,” one said.

“We can let you go this time,” the other scolded. “Go home and make up or see a marriage counsellor.”

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Krystyna writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction regardless of the season or location she finds herself in.

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”

Blessed Morrissey. Everyone sings. Jennifer’s a junior and she has her own car. She starts the engine and on the summer night highway she says, “Wanna get kicked out of the Hilton?”

I’m in back on the hump, a hand on each front seat. Her hair, her piercings, her red glitter black lipstick shimmering in streetlights, so close. I want to whisper in her ear something so funny and sexy she just has to kiss me and we crash and I fly through the windshield but everyone who sees my body sees my black lipstick glitter mouth and knows.

“Yeah.” From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook 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 contests at Loud Coffee Press and A Story in 100 Words, and it has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies. 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/.

Lipstick Car Wreck

Finally alone, you open your coat in the snowRevealing the soft hum of your pilot lightLiving, walking to the water’s edgeTo pray for river’s cleansethe water is polluted with reflectionSo you run, you always do, into an idlecar on the street outsideOf where you need to be, you’ve circled around3 times already (you’re not getting any more inside)and drive, flood down the avenue to the last bridgeLeft erect from burned out comings-aliveswitch, from automatic to manualStop self-correcting let it careenA smile like wreckage smears across your face

From Guest Contributor Wyatt Martin

Delia

She waits at the bar every night, alone in the corner. Her eyes smudged with fine lines and tear stains from years gone by. Lipstick is applied to chaffed lips and she brushes harsh, greying hairs. Her wrinkled hands fiddle aimlessly with yet another glass of the only fluid that offers relief. Her clothes are worn, unchanged throughout the fashions of the last two decades. Every night she drinks in the corner. Every night she drags herself home, a cigarette slouching from her drying mouth. She remembers little else.

With heavy heart she waits for him. He promised to return.

From Guest Contributor Kerry Kelly