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"The Storm" by Jennifer Flynn - © 2008
<- FROM THE EDITOR -> Who Was The President Then?
by Derek Alger
The guy handed me my plastic bag of purchases, and I don’t know why, but taking it in my left hand, I extended my right hand to shake his, only with my index finger pointing out toward him.
“President McKinley was assassinated in 1901,” I said, adding that a guy came up to him with a bandaged hand concealing a gun and when McKinley reached out to shake hands, he was shot twice.
<- ONE ON ONE -> Pam Uschuk
interviewed by Derek Alger
"...Almost too late, I learned to love my mother. Sometimes taking care of her constant needs felt like an imposition, but I've come to understand that it was also a huge gift I'm still unwrapping. I've written about her in poetry and prose, and I continue to untangle the web of my knotty childhood."
Greg Herriges
interviewed by Derek Alger
"...While my students were dying in gang fights, I had to enter a numerical symbol next to each dead student’s name... A big “L” meant the student had left the system. A little “l” meant the student had been transferred to another class in the school. “99” meant you’d been capped, hacked, and stacked, Jack. It was enough to make you sick."
<- ESSAY -> Consent
by Carol Fletcher
I go home. I go to see my other kids, because they need me, but really, because I need them. I take them to dentist appointments and birthday parties. On a play date, a mom confides to me that her son won’t stop hitting in nursery school. What should she do, she wonders. I’m stunned by the question. Why ask me? I can hardly keep my kid alive.
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<- POETRY -> Yield
by Stephanie Goehring
O CARELESS LOVE
by R.M. Ryan
PMS AT 45
by Susan Rothbard
<- MACRO-FICTION -> The Tea Party
by Carolyn Foster Segal
I really did believe that I loved the boy with the cheekbones, although looking back, it's clear how much lust played a part.
"Do you have a husband?" Mel asks. He doesn't say, as anyone else would, "Are you married?" He makes having a husband sound like owning a pet.
<- MICRO-FICTION -> Remember Guernica
by Kate Gale
"My sister and I are in the small minority of Whites, but I will not adapt. I wear my Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath close to me. I walk the talk, I listen to music, I am the street, the sound, the dirt, the hooded head, the low torn sweatshirt, the sagging pants, I am over six feet and I am every security person's nightmare..."
<- BOOK LOVERS -> Carl Phillips' Speak Low, a Review
reviewed by Sandy Marchetti
There are tissue paper-thin ideas of meaning in the poem, and all the poems; Phillips is so infinitesimal in his perceptive thought, we see how he embodies the talents that make him an excellent translator of poems and essayist on the art of poetry. The poet divides back onto himself, revising and adding, often through non-essential clauses, the most essential ideas.
The Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
reviewed by Andrea Cumbo
"The thematic questions of the book are what make it beat with life, but the complexity of the story – with comic books within comics, three time periods (or none if you’re Dr. Manhattan) and multiple settings – makes it truly postmodern in its ability to deconstruct both time and space while still holding a single, primary storyline..."
<- GUEST COLUMN -> On Becoming a Poet: A Brief Memoir
by C.E. Chaffin
"...If a child is deprived of normal physical bonding prior to language acquisition, which increases exponentially somewhere around the age of two, I think language can become the chief means by which such a child seeks bonding. If true, it makes sense that poets spend the rest of their lives trying to express in words what they could not gain in touch and comfort. At the least, I think this holds true for me..."
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