Pamela Wax – Upon reading that Superhero Rocket Raccoon was inspired by the Beatles song, I think
about the masked bandit that has been pillaging my garden sometime in the pre-dawn hours when I’m not there to guard it, gnawing wedges from the zucchini, and leaving half-eaten tomatoes in the bed as compost. He’s a menace to the neighborhood, and I can’t get rid of him, despite the trap and the light […]
Richard Peabody – The Queen of American Gothic
The Queen of American Gothic is waiting “I’m ready,” she says as lonely as the only car in a bowling alley parking lot Born in Washington, DC, raised in Bethesda, and now living in Arlington, VA, poet, writer, editor, teacher, and publisher Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He taught fiction […]
Gilbert Allen – Cross Dressers
Cross Dressers God only knew why they’d sought out his church for the detritus of their Saturdays. As pastor, he was always first one there on Sunday mornings. Lately he’d been parking in the bleak darkness just before the dawn to police the symbol of the risen Christ— remove the Clemson cap, or produce bag […]
Michael Montlack – When God
When God is your brother, solitary, first born, aloof and one step ahead, able but not always willing to share his wisdom. When God is an idol under your pillow, listening, you assume, never speaking, though you sometimes swear there’s a whisper clear as the strum of a Sunday night busker, his well-worn guitar like […]
Chante Wolf – The Forgotten Girls
The Forgotten Girls the orphan children surrounded me clay prisoners of solitary their cracked fingers in my yellow hair gripped my hands as if they held their lost families’ photographs that laid broken by their tilted dressers the bravest touched my camera begged in broken English to release the body into her hands I let […]
