by Gabriella Herkert

She runs. Out the door, down the stairs and away. Away from the shrilling telephone. Away from them. Haunting her. Hounding her. Tonight, so close. Reaching out with cloying hands to drag her back to the past, to the pain. The rain clatters against the street, dark sheets of mind-numbing cold, the icy drops stinging against her skin. Her pace slows, the steadier tempo a forced normalcy she doesn’t feel. Had never felt. Would never feel.

(read on…)

by Debbie Taber

Like a disease, they pay no regard to age, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, financial status, or ability to dance the tarantella. Rejection letters find writers in every genre, and we all have to deal with them somehow.

(read on…)

by Alex Kachmar

‘When I turn 29, I’m gonna put a bullet through my head.’

And that’s how I meet Shamus Kelly. (read on…)

by David Lee Kirkland

I stand at my window
offer bare breasts, press them
like lilies into the cold glass.
They flatten like new moons.
I wonder who watches,
who might enter the space between.
from Voyeur, by Karla Huston

Anna Louise took us all by surprize, you might say, reading that poem. She keeps the library open late every Tuesday night for the book club, with the first meeting each month being poetry night. Me, well, I’m not much for poetry, though I started driving a widow woman who won’t miss a single session, and admission being free makes the price right.
(read on…)

by D.K. McCutchen

“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale’s heart.’ – Paley’s Theology

My Kiwi crewmate Simon had an idea. He was going to help me get started on a research project on dolphins –if I decided to stay in New Zealand. He knew his supervisors had some data available on toxins in Hector’s dolphin, a tiny toothed whale endemic to the islands. Up to now we’d been out assisting on a sperm whale study, the opposite end of the spectrum in size. I read every science paper Simon had and wrote his supervisors with ideas proposing possible areas of study. A year of research promised so much. It could be a step forward, allow me to create my own direction. I didn’t have to be ship’s Nanny anymore.
(read on…)