Run Run Run

Last one home is a rotten egg.

Run.

Coach says if I make top two in the state I'll get a scholarship offer from every school in the country.

Run.

We saw red and blue lights flashing from the front yard at Kristi Fields' graduation party.

Run.

Becca asked if we were boyfriend and girlfriend now that we'd done it.

Run.

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?

Run.

A knock on the door. Blood all over the floor, all over my hands, all over the knife. No one will believe the truth.

Run. Run. Run.

Limits

This can only last so long. There’s stuff I have to do. I gotta catch up on work and go for a run still today. I have papers due by midnight and I just put a pizza in the oven. I don’t have time for this. My friend keeps texting me “get on the game.” This can only last so long. I’m organizing due dates, scheduling movie nights with friends and stuttering replies to my mother. This can only last so long. My phone lights up with her face again, but like this poem love can only last so long.

From Guest Contributor Anonymous

I’d prefer to remain anonymous however I’d like to say a little about myself. I am not a writer but a teenage kid trying to graduate. I enjoy thinking deeply and taking the chance to put my thoughts on a page in a creative writing class is nice.

Mercury’s Lunchbox

The courier waits outside the O.R. A moment after a surgeon calls the time of death, a nurse emerges, hands her a container. He says, “Go!”

She hits a flat-out run. Courier and container speed in her van to the other hospital. Her supervisor radios warning: the patient’s chest is open. Four or five minutes are the bought time, but here’s a red light. Ninety seconds leeway when she’s met by fresh legs at the E.R.’s drop-off lane.

Before she hears if the patient survived, she’s picked up a container with a kidney in it.

Always urgent, never finished. Hurrying.From Guest Contributor Todd Mercer

Todd writes Fiction and Poetry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His collection Ingenue was published in 2020 by Celery City Press. Recent work appears in Blink Ink, Literary Yard and Pangolin Review.

Of Weak Spots

Summer holidays meant wagon rides and a delicious break from school.

On the run for letting the poultry loose, my brother and I were making a hidden treehouse.

Later, we would have gone to the bank, devoured stolen nuts, nailed floorboards, as punishment. Together, we would have made jokes. Of weak spots on the fence and Granddad!

However, the treehouse being too feeble, our hands slippery from juice, hearts too unwilling, he fell to death.

Standing on the desolate bank, I glance at the familiar walnut blooms at Johnson’s. I wonder how we never discovered the weak spot in life.

From Guest Contributor Swatilekha Roy