The Day Before Yesterday

Meanwhile, Franz Kafka sells another piece of his dead mother’s jewelry to pay for his brothel visits. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse go horseback riding together. Alma Mahler has just aborted their child. The police question Picasso, but he has an alibi and they release him after slapping him around. Summer is fading, and Rainer Maria Rilke feels it as a wound in his chest. Using an alias, Adolf Hitler boards a train for Munich to escape conscription in the Austro-Hungarian army. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is missing from the Louvre. Museumgoers lay flowers in front of the bare wall.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

As A River Runs Cold

When the sun finally set that evening, it was as if someone was turning off a faucet. The water ran clear and cold, then stopped running altogether, leaving behind a long, jagged-edged stain on the pavement that slowly grew into a pool of blood on the street below, like a wound left open too long, growing wider.

Clouds pressed down hard against the earth while the sky darkened. The townspeople began dying in great numbers. The river never once turned red with the blood that flowed through its banks. Nothing could change the truth of who and what I'd become.From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Soldier

The soldier’s leg is broken in two places, but he’s courageous and doesn’t scream. As I’m cleaning the wound, he grabs my arm.

“I won’t be fighting again, will I?”

I gently remove his hand. “I’m afraid not. You’ll be heading home. Your mother will be overjoyed to see you.”

He kisses my hand and looks into my eyes. “At least in this hell, I got to see a beautiful nurse to remember.”

I follow his stare, then lean in and kiss his forehead. “Take care, soldier.”

The sepsis will soon kill him, and he’ll return home in a coffin.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

A Good Day

My day wasn’t a wasted one after all, he said to the man in the mirror while washing the blood from his hands. He lifted his shirt and uncovered a nasty wound on his abdomen. His clothes were ruined, those stains would never wash out.

The radio was on and reported on events earlier that day:“...concerning the mystery man who saved two children from a burning building. The man jumped through a window on the second floor carrying the infants. He might be in need of some medical attention…”

Not a bad day at all, said the Superhero. From Guest Contributor Hervé Suys

Hervé Suys (°1968 – Ronse, Belgium) started writing whilst recovering from a sports injury. He writes his disturbing fiction generally barefooted and hatless.

Sniper

As if part of the land Masha merges into the rubble. A file of battle-weary Wehrmacht fighters passes.

The last is in her sights.

She had hunted deer in Siberia. They never detected her, so camouflage in Stalingrad’s snow-clad ruins is easy.

Deer, she respects, sharers of the Motherland, killing only for meat.

These Nazi scum are vermin. She would exterminate them all if she could.

She aims for the chest to mortally wound. He falls.

Two comrades rush back to help.

Her next two bullets pass through their foreheads.

She scurries off undetected, three more notches to her name.

From Guest Contributor Ian Fletcher

The Left Eye Is Enough

Because you can see. It is other people who have the problem--flies cannot understand singular vision; pros and cons blink in unison. Suits and snoots on the train and even the grubs on the street shoot sideways sneers and whispers, feary scowls and snickers. The nothingness bothers them, the absence of the right, smooth as burned-off fingerprints. They are not convinced by your best prosthetic and toss you pity, a reward for your emulation of their normalcy. Dark glasses and patches insult the blind and pirates. Your final answer is the biggest lie by the bluntest knife: a wound.From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. She teaches college writing and is the co-owner and chief editor of BluePlanetJournal.com. Her nonfiction, poetry, and flash fiction have appeared in Creations Magazine, Little India, Outpost, Nowhere Poetry, and The Syzygy Poetry Journal.

Christmas Eve On The Eastern Front

Schmidt and I carry Braun into the church. Outside we’d freeze to death this Christmas Eve.

Icy wind blows through the shell hole in the cupola. We break up a pew for a fire.

It illuminates a statue of St. Michael.

We share a cup of schnapps.

Braun cannot partake. His stomach wound means he will die during the night.

We hear the squeaking of metal tracks.

“Tanks!”

Schmidt extinguishes the fire. If they’re T-34s we’re doomed. The Russians take no prisoners for what we’ve done to their land.

In the darkness I sense St. Michael’s eyes staring down unforgivingly.

From Guest Contributor Ian Fletcher