Some Friday night, it might be worth a try: after a glass or two of French, a page or more of some ambitious book, let go into the couch. When you wake up, lights on, at 3 am, not sure just where, or who you are, assume you’ve died, a ghost, for the first time, […]
Issue 102
David Landon
David Landon was the winner of the 2019 Write Prize from Able Muse. His poems have appeared in the Cumberland River Review, The Dark Horse, The Southwest Review (Marr Prize Runner-up), Georgia Review (featured finalist: Loraine Williams Prize), Think Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Sewanee Theological Review, Subtropics, American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review (Guy Owen Prize finalist), Poetry Porch, and elsewhere. As an actor he has performed with the […]
David Landon: Bach, Onomatopoeia, and the Wreck
For all we knew, it was a random chunk of interstellar rock, the rear-end crash that brought us to a halt. Dinner was out, of course, and the Bach too, I realized, feeling it in my neck, and standing there in the rain, examining my totaled car, the guilty driver soaked, in tears. The cops […]
Nikki Ummel: A Wake for One
I avoid dressing my own dead. I made it eight years as a mortician before I broke my one, unspoken rule. Thanks, mother. The medical examiner’s report said she died from “blunt force trauma to the head” when her body collided with the packed rock and dirt trail. At fifty, she was surprisingly spry, so […]
Jac Smith: Benefitting Positions
On Mondays Jane meets with the Rabbi between 2:00 and 5:00, in his bed, at his home, which is walking distance from the synagogue. On Tuesdays she joins the Activist downtown at his floor-to-ceiling, glass-windowed loft that has a full panoramic view of the city. On Wednesdays Jane takes the bus to the university, building […]
Maria McLeod: The Eternal Fall Backwards
I hold his head in my hands, pull it to my chest. O. O of his mouth. Eyes glazed. It’s dark and he didn’t mean to do it. Make out the words, hit and run, man run over. Wanted to kill him. Words of the mouth: pathetic, half human, why don’t I die, why not […]