Spring Cleaning

Winter surrendered. Riverbanks croaked a single splash with each muddied footstep. Wild Sweet William's dainty lavender flower mingled lush green leaves and twisting vines of yellow-hued buttercups and scarlet sumac. Scraps of ocean blue ribbon and coral-colored yarn frantically entwined weaving sticks and leaves, nesting six brown-speckled eggs. Wild turkeys gathered strutting rowed corn fields. Beneath the refuge of centenarian pine fawns struggle against tottering wobbled legs. Snapping turtles lazily sit side by side sunning on downed oak logs across the trickling eddy. A deluded hummingbird, hoodwinked by an empty bird feeder, tells me to get busy.

From Guest Contributor Christy Schuld

Capezio

Some of us are birthed rigid, leather left too long in the sun, so carefully struck dense beneath hands. Everyone and everything’s hands. Shaped into whatever it is we play at long before your shadow cooled me. You knit something soft overtop, fingers of catgut dancing like satin ribbon and for a time there is a concealing, something less than painful looming in the mirror. And though we both knew I would ravel and tear with so many seams under the strain of your weight, I knew the taste of skin on your throat, and we made the world spin.

Nick Christian is a poet and fiction writer who currently studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

The Acersecomic

Her hair had never been cut. In a way that was totally dissimilar to Rapunzel, she was a prisoner, trapped by whatever strange mixture of fate and circumstance that determined what we are to become in this life.

If she had been born a Buddha, perhaps she'd have lived many lives and enjoyed all manner of fashionable hairstyles. Instead, she was stillborn with a full head of hair. She was buried with that same tussock, tied together with a bright pink ribbon her mother had tried to purchase from the local notions shop only to find her money was refused.