An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash
Poetry by Kate McNairy
I’ve been longing for you,
minutes dog my hours—
a prism splits
early morning light.
There’s so much chatter
among colors
that I am not alone—
there is so much to feel
& in a clump of orange
tiger lilies by the road
petal touches petal.
Kate McNairy has a forthcoming chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her work appears in Third Wednesday, Raven’s Perch and The Bluebird Word, among other journals. Kate lives in upstate New York.
Nonfiction by Dick Daniels
My favorite race tee came from the Amory Railroad Festival Run. Bright orange and black, which happened to be my college colors, the front displayed a grinning locomotive chugging down the tracks in running shoes. Whenever worn, it stood out and drew favorable comments from other runners.
The shirt has long since gone the way of so many other articles of clothing: either victimized by my laundering inadequacies; passed down to one of my three sons; or packed in a grocery sack for donation to a local charity. However, my memories of that race day remain—as vivid as the orange of that shirt.
Amory didn’t have the appeal of other Mississippi towns like Natchez, Oxford, or even neighboring Tupelo. If Elvis had been born about twenty miles further south, that tee might have had a different face. But Amory had given birth to a thriving rail center, and that was the part of its history around which it created a festival every spring.
I was living in Memphis at the time and Amory was only a two-hour drive. The race brochure was particularly inviting—something for the whole family. Train rides on authentic railroad cars! Merchandise drawings! Colorful t-shirts! And the unstated possibility to a man nearing forty that he might have a chance for an age-group trophy at the small-city event. In those days, I eagerly journeyed to such out-of-town races as the Okraland Stampede and the Trenton Teapot Trot. The idea of accumulating more race shirts than you could ever wear had not occurred to me.
So off we went, my wife and youngest son along for the festivities. The sun came up early that late-spring day. Its warmth was particularly soothing after so many cold and dreary days of winter. The temperature eventually reached about 85 degrees, which doesn’t sound all that scary to a Southern runner. It was, however, the first day that year of any significant heat, and I would later calculate that it was nearly 30 degrees warmer than the average temperature at which I had been training just a few weeks prior.
As we gathered at the starting line, a quick survey of the field indicated a supreme effort might indeed result in age group recognition. For some reason, the actual start caught most of us by surprise, and there was an excessive amount of chaos and jostling for position as startled runners surged ahead. I remember seeing a young boy of ten or eleven who lost one of his shoes in the ensuing panic. He fought to retrieve it without being trampled by the herd of thinclads, then wisely retreated to the safety of the sidelines to lace up. A Stage Mom shrieked at him the whole time, ‘Hurry! You’re going to be last!’ Mercifully, I was soon out of earshot and had some running space.
The Amory Run, as I recall, was a five-miler, and I expected it to be less demanding than all those 10Ks which were the standard race at that time. My split times were pretty good the first two miles, but it was soon painfully apparent that I was overheating. I could visualize wavy vapors coming off the top of my head. That sinking feeling of knowing that you had ‘gone out too fast’ slowly overtook me. A mile later the disgrace of stopping to walk during a race had to be endured. It was my first time, and it was humbling. But I knew there was no other choice.
With each person that passed me, I suffered a little more as runners with excess weight or without the smoothest strides went streaming by. There were even children passing me. Among them, I recognized the boy who had lost his shoe at the start. His labored breathing had been audible before I saw him. As he went by, I could see a face flushed as red as a warning light on a car’s dashboard, similarly indicating an impending boilover. In that instant, I imagined how he might be struggling to gain his mother’s approval, thought about my own upbringing and how achievements had been expected by my parents, and knew how proud I would have been to see one of my sons showing that much determination.
Before he got too far ahead, I broke into a half-sprint to catch up, resolved to help him finish. I pulled up beside him and asked if he minded some company. His breathing was so heavy, words could not be summoned, so a shake of his head was my invitation. Over the remainder of that course, he became the recipient of all the information I had ever read on breathing, relaxation and pace. ‘Hold what you got!’ was encouragingly repeated.
My own pain and humiliation had been forgotten, and before I knew it, we had turned a corner and entered a long parking lot that housed the finish line at its other end. The resilience of youth and the shouts of Amory citizens lining the course spurred him to sprint the final straightaway, and I watched him proudly as he exuberantly pulled away with arms and legs flailing. When I finally came up behind him in the chute, he uttered his first words as he turned and looked up to me, ‘Thanks, Mister!’ I nearly cried. To borrow from Charles Dickens, “it was the worst of times” I ever ran, but “the best of times” I ever had running.
Dick Daniels is a combat veteran from Memphis with nonfiction work in Submarine Review and several other military magazines. His fiction pieces, backboned by historical research, have appeared in multiple journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Hare’s Paw, Wilderness House, Cardinal Sins, Valley Voices, and Two Thirds North.
Poetry by Marsha Howland
A solo artist sings in the
woods close by. Four notes,
a pause, then two and six
(three times). For several
minutes this bird loudly
performs. Then comes a
soft echo from deeper in
the woods. They sing a
duet, back and forth, his
voice growing more faint
each time he flies further
into the thickening trees.
By stages, song and
response move closer and
closer, until it almost seems
there is one voice, one song,
one small triumph in the
eternal progressions of
life. The nature of things:
You find your voice and, if
blessed, find another.
Marsha Howland‘s poems have been published in The Moon issue of The Black and White series, the American Journal of Nursing, and Waves (AROHO). As a senior at Wellesley, Marsha won the college’s Academy of American Poets prize. She had the privilege of studying with poets David Ferry and Frank Bidart.
Nonfiction by Angie Sarhan Salvatore
The hearts drifted from the sky that October, cascading much like snowflakes or teardrops do. Though I requested them, their sight still startled me.
I ask for signs the way people order coffee—without thinking, a habit ingrained over time. Is this the right choice? Show me a sign. Do I say yes? Show me a sign.
This was different. You were gone without goodbye. Desperate for a lifeline, instinct kicked in. Show me a heart if you’re with me, I whispered.
Only three hours later, a heart found me. While I thought the heart might come in the form of a bumper sticker or a billboard while I drove to work, that’s not how you showed up. Instead, the sign came while I walked to my office, shoulders slumped, feet slow, head down. My mind caught up to my eyes a few seconds after I took it in. I turned around to look again. I was shocked, but only for a moment.
I knew if you could, you would send me signs.
Years ago, I visited you at your home in London. I could immediately tell that this place was your heart. You could immediately tell I wasn’t visiting, but rather escaping. I was having an upside down moment in life, and hadn’t figured out how to make it right side up again. You offered me a quiet space to settle and sort things out.
When you asked what I wanted to do on my trip, and I replied I wanted to see a psychic, you didn’t seem surprised. Yes, we would sightsee, and yes, I would fall in love with London returning again and again to stay with you, but the first priority was find someone with answers, since I sure as hell didn’t have any.
I wasn’t sure where you stood with psychics or the afterlife, but as my older cousin, you indulged my request, making an appointment at what I would later find out was a world-famous psychic shop. You accompanied me, which made me feel accepted. I opened up. You understood my need to believe in something beyond me. You understood my need to look for signs.
There I stood, eyes fixed on the beige leaf, misshapen and alone—an offering of hope in the darkness. I picked it up from its stem and it was obvious this folded over leaf was a heart. I choked out a breath. I reached for my phone, took a photo, and gently put the leaf back. Thank you, I said to the sky, to you.
For the rest of the day I regretted not keeping it, not saving it somewhere.
Thankfully, this was the first of many signs to come.
Days collapsed into weeks. The leaves found me, over and over again. These unusual gifts became a trail of breadcrumbs propelling me forward each day, giving comfort and reassurance you were with me. Some bore jagged edges. Others looked like a perfectly crafted cutout, but they all had something in common.
Each fallen heart seemed like a symbol of resilience and I saw reflections of me—torn, scattered, and in full surrender. These delicate offerings felt like tiny miracles, nudges from you reassuring me somehow. I took photos and collected them. I told myself I wanted to preserve the memory, but really I wanted to preserve the proof. I saved them like treasures, tucking them away for safekeeping—tokens to be found sometime in the future, when the leaves might stop appearing or when I needed to be reminded of something more.
In those moments, I saw myself as a woman with a beat up heart, desperately hanging onto beat up heart-shaped leaves, but I didn’t care. Though they didn’t take away the sting of your unshakeable loss, they felt like an elixir to my soul, making the grief more manageable, if only for a moment.
I started painting a small, black heart on my fingernail. All of a sudden, we had a thing going. Death didn’t sever our connection. It just took a new shape.
I went back to London three years after your passing. As I packed to leave, I wondered if I would go by your place, if even to pass it from the outside. The idea simultaneously gutted and lifted me, and so, minutes before I left for the airport I tucked something in my purse.
A place can be a container, filled with a mixture of memories, emotions, and past selves. London held so many versions of me. The sad one. The lost one. The hopeful one. The happy one. It had yet to carry this new version, though. The me-without-you one.
Your son was in town and asked me to come by your place. I think he sensed I needed to be there.
It was exactly as I remembered. The staircase that seemed endless. The artwork you painstakingly picked out, hanging in every possible spot. I thought of how happy you would be that we were there together.
When I had a moment alone, I reached into my purse for my hidden treasure. Your son told me that one day he might have to sell this place, my home away from home. It made sense that I did this then.
I hid a tiny heart-shaped amethyst in the unused fireplace. I placed it with a silent prayer, a thank you for all that you gave me: for your grace, generosity and kindness when I was at my lowest; for your friendship and guidance when I was flailing; and for your faith in me. I thanked you for the signs that still arrive when I need them most.
I doubt that amethyst will ever be found. At least, that’s my hope. I want it to remain in the dark depths of this faraway, sacred spot so that a piece of my heart will always be there, nestled in with a piece of yours.
Angie Sarhan Salvatore is a Writing Professor. Her writing has been featured on The Huffington Post, Tiny Buddha, Positively Positive, Mind Body Green, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, Having Time, Herself 360 and her blog: universeletters.com. You can find Angie on social media @universeletters.
Poetry by Norbert Hirschhorn
The Prologue
Once upon a time, a young woman—beautiful, good, true—lived in a forest hut with her poor but honest parents. One day, a Prince came by on horseback & looking out for a bit of mischief, began to court her. Her parents, knowing what could come, tried to talk sense: We’re beneath his station, he’ll break your heart, we need you here, & so forth. But she was ecstatic; it had never happened before, probably would never again. You see, although she was lovely, virtuous, etc., she had a deformity, tuberculosis of the spine from childhood. But she was too happy to think clearly, & the Prince, perhaps a little in love, appeared not to notice. One day he rode up to the little hut saying, Get yourself ready, I want to introduce you to the King and Queen. Her parents, wanting only her happiness, sold their cow, pawned their dishes, mortgaged their little plot so she could wear something decorous, lovely for the meeting. But only one thing, said the Prince. Yes, darling, anything, she replied. When we enter the Royal Court, try to stand up straight.
The Voices
The Young Woman’s Parents (a duet): We were idiots to think this could even be. All that time we deliberately stayed in the forest, away from people, so our daughter would never have cause to be unhappy.
The King: Reginald disappoints. A gadabout, he has never buckled down to study statecraft and the arts of war. So, when he announced he had been taken in by this opportunist with her mincing gait, I was ready to disinherit the fool, send him out of the Kingdom.
The Queen: He is a good son. Headstrong like his father, but a romantic like me. Perhaps it was something about the zephyrs, the honeysuckle, forest trails surprising at each turn. When the King courted me, I too was cloistered, shy, worshipful. I would have liked to have met this young innocent.
The Prince: So imagine how I felt! Well, she was sweet. I thought she was just being humble, not a hunchback. I’d never hear the end of it from my mates, never mind all the goosey gossip. I had some gold coins sent over.
The Young Woman: It was a dream, and so it sweetened my life. I know no one lives happily ever after, especially not in a castle. But if the King had condemned him to exile, I would have gone with him. My parents and I are moving deeper into the forest.
Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero,” proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. Hirschhorn has published seven previous collections; recently Over the Edge from Holland Park Press, London. Visit https://bertzpoet.com.
Poetry by Andy Oram
Free from guile or prejudice, snow
Casts a rarified grace.
It fills the land with crisp equity,
Assured monument to the Earth’s greatest artifice,
The tip in axis that brings us appointed seasons.
Crystal, by breeze-sculpted crystal, fasten atoms
Poised to bestow the promise of
Our existence.
Each waterous orb, spritz of the universe’s most fertile molecule,
Hugs its drop until the Earth’s bias turns once again
So that the crocus and hyacinth wake to its flow.
If you take the snow to you,
If you survey its bright prospects,
Stride into its treasured potential,
Run hands through its sharp intensity,
Taste its porcelain presence,
You can glory in the working of the world.
Andy Oram is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. Print publications where his writings have appeared include The Economist, The Journal of Information Technology & Politics, and Vanguardia Dossier.
Poetry by Christine Andersen
My daughter and her husband
renovated a house on Lake Champlain.
She sent pictures of the expansive view
from their living room,
how the magenta sunset tinged the water,
the way grass was filling in on the slope leading down to the dock.
A few doors down, her mother-in-law is disappearing.
She can’t remember where the silverware drawer is
or how the pocket door slides open.
She tells the same stories over and over
as if delivering new news.
Stares at the lake trying to recall its name.
My son-in-law bought several packages of wildflower
seeds and tilled the ground close to the shore.
He had visions of daisies and Queen Anne’s lace
and an assortment of yellow, purple, and red blossoms
leaning on green stems with bees and butterflies feeding,
the ground firmly set against heavy rain by the tangle of roots.
Wildflowers can bring the outside indoors.
Would perhaps help his mother remember
daisies were always her favorite flower.
How she would set them on the breakfast table
when he picked them for her as a young boy.
They would pluck the petals one by one,
say, “I love you, I love you not,”
always magically ending on “I love you.”
When the daisies grew in clumps,
he carried a bouquet of memory to her doorstep
and handed her a flower.
She haltingly plucked the white petals one by one,
placed them in his outstretched hand.
Whispered in a child’s voice, “I love you.”
Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who lives in Connecticut with five hounds. She has published over 100 poems. Her poetry book “To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone” won the 2025 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest sponsored by Choeofpleirn Press.
Poetry by Ed Meek
If you too could extrude silk
From your body to weave
A net of fragile filaments
Like gossamer wings
Arranged in a pattern
Of encircled squares,
Strong enough to entrap
Your prey with the aid
Of goo. Would you sacrifice
Your two legs for eight
To hang your clever work of art
like a hammock
between the plants,
Immersed in a world
foreign to man?
Ed Meek‘s book of poems “Great Pond” comes out in 2026 with Kelsay Books. He has had poems recently in Amethyst, Humana Obscura, and The Baltimore Review.
Poetry by Sheri Flowers Anderson
Even those tasteless ones that taste like water,
those ones with the soft texture
of out-of-season defeat, can be composted,
fed back to nature, reclaimed into the earth.
I prefer the cleansing scent and sweetness, the mild
tart-tingle-crunch of fresh taste in my mouth,
biting into the unpeeled whole of an apple, the
whole of life, just as it is,
delighting in nature’s freshness, in the inspired,
intimate relationship with an apple a day
Surely, I’d fail a blind taste test, these tastebuds
unskilled in differentiating between a Fuji and a Gala,
or a Red Delicious and a Mcintosh. But still,
I’d savor the varying flavors, the firm texture,
my teeth and tongue enmeshed with this simple
thrill, the magnificence, bite after bite.
Sheri Flowers Anderson writes and lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Unbroken Journal, Pensive Journal and others. She’s the author of a poetry collection entitled House and Home (Broadside Lotus Press). When she’s not writing or reading, she’s watching YouTube. Visit: https://linktr.ee/sheriflowersanderson.
Fiction by Lois Anne DeLong
Rita’s feet hurt. She had been patrolling the aisles since the theatre opened at ten that morning. Outside, New York City had begun celebrating the end of 1939 hours ago. But here, in this dark hall, there was no sense of anything new coming into being. And, by the time Rita re-entered the real world, the big moment would be over. 1940 would already be in motion.
Meanwhile, here in the Roxy Theatre, where the walls weep paint from its glory days before the Great Depression, the only meaning time had was how much more of the film was left to unspool. Rita guessed it had perhaps another 15 minutes to go. A different film might have helped the time pass quicker. Down the street, they were showing “Raffles,” starring David Niven as a charming jewel thief. Here it was the day’s sixth showing of “Another Thin Man,” the third installment of a film series that, in Rita’s mind at least, was wearing thin. Really, she thought, how many times can you watch Myrna Loy and William Powell make elegant chit chat?
“Hey, William, I could use a martini about now,” she said under her breath, as Powell, in the guise of detective Nick Charles, was prepping yet another drink on the screen. “Come on,” the fictional conversation continued, “It’s New Year’s Eve, for Pete’s sake. Why does everyone get to lift a glass but me?”
As she braced herself against the wall to take some stress off her aching legs, Rita found herself beginning to doze off. At one point, she barely caught herself from pitching forward onto the threadbare carpet. Like other elements of the once beautiful Roxy, the rug had seen better days. The city may have recovered from the Depression, but the Roxy reaped no such benefits. She brushed a hand across the wall of the small alcove, near the exit sign and the shedding paint fell like leaden rain. Rita was grateful for the job—shift work like this made it possible for her to continue her studies— but it certainly wasn’t the most pleasant place to spend one’s days.
As she lightly stomped her feet to reduce the tingles, she found herself questioning every decision in her young life. She let out a sigh as she acknowledged how much easier it would have been if she had accepted Allen’s earnest proposal and become a New Jersey housewife. Instead, she had chosen to continue her slog toward a degree that did not even guarantee her a job, and a life in one room of a boarding house so small she knew all the intimate details of her neighbors’ sex lives.
The back door of the theatre opened quietly and Charley, the manager, stepped in. Rita moved into the aisle to be sure she was seen. Charley hated it when the staff sat during their shifts. He must have seen her at her post, because he waved vaguely in her direction and then shut the door behind him. A lifelong bachelor, with no family to speak of, the Roxy seemed to be Charley’s whole world, and it was a world he guarded with surprising ferocity. Rita didn’t like him much, but she had to admit he was fair, and everything he asked of his staff was designed to keep the marquee lit. For all this, he had earned her grudging respect in recent days.
Rita walked back a few aisles and as she did, each step reminded how long she had kept her vigil by the exit. She contemplated heading up to the balcony now to get a head start on clean-up. But, there were dangers in the dark up there, from tripping on the stairs to being groped by the drifters who used the balcony as their own personal flophouse. Instead, she decided to sit out the last few frames of the film. Charley be damned, she thought. As she sat down, the rush of blood through her weary legs was as refreshing as one of the ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola chilling by the snack bar.
A quick check of her watch revealed that 1940 was only seconds away. What would that year hold? And, would she still be celebrating the start of 1941 within these walls? She was too tired to contemplate the answers to such questions. Instead, she watched William, Myrna, and their surprisingly intelligent dog solve yet another mystery. As the credits began to roll, she wondered if Charley might want to have a drink when they finished closing up. There was a New Year to welcome and neither of them had anywhere else to go.
Lois Anne DeLong is a freelance writer living in Queens, New York, and an active member of the Woodside Writers literary forum. Her work has appeared in Dear Booze, Short Beasts, Bright Flash Literary Journal, The Bluebird Word, and DarkWinter Literary Journal.
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