Literary as hell.

Tag: creative writing (Page 1 of 4)

Flat White by Gavin Turner

Mike watched the electronic boards flicker round to the inevitable delayed notifications. Not only was he now going to miss the first hour of the conference, but he also knew he would be forced to hang around in a ridiculous coffee shop for an hour whilst the rail network corrected itself and provided the transport he had paid for. There was a collective sag of shoulders on the platform. Mike sauntered out of the station amongst the other dejected commuters in search of the nearest place to get a drink.

Standing alone, tight up against the embankment wall of the train station, he spotted a glinting metal building, with a dark cobalt roof. Through the long glass window he saw what appeared to be a stainless steel counter. Just outside, a black sandwich board wobbled slightly in the morning breeze. In simplistic writing the word ‘Coffee’ had been emblazoned in blue chalk. This was enough to entice him in.

The Peoples ‘ethically sourced coffee’ he read in monochrome arch above the doorway. He saw most of the commuters wandering away in other directions, which suited him just fine. Why would he want to spend the next hour awkwardly exchanging glances with people who believed they had a common late commuter cause or worse still, tried to engage him in pointless, mind-numbing conversation.

‘Peoples coffee’ was remarkably quiet for an early morning. In fact, there appeared to be only one other customer. As the door closed with a click, the noise seemed to prompt the bearded chap at one of the tables to spring into action. It turned out the presumed customer was actually the staff, even better.

‘Morning’ the bearded chap chirped, and welcome to Peoples coffee. What can I get for you? he said moving round to the other side of the counter. The newly identified barista looked to be a hipster type, with a smart black and silver apron. He had a sallow complexion and piercing eyes. His sad clothes on the other hand looked like they may well have been rescued from a skip.

Mike reviewed the chalkboard behind the barista. It was difficult to focus on. The writing seemed too small to read and was jumping around all over the place. He knew at some point soon he was going to have to give in to age and get glasses, vanity would push him to hold off for now though. Forcing his hand he knew he would just have to ask for something and hope it was on the menu. Surely coffee was coffee though? Giving customers every possible combination or version of the same drink always seemed a bit pompous and unnecessary. You make a coffee, maybe you put in too much milk, that’s a latte. On the way back to the cupboard you spill some cocoa on top, now it’s a cappuccino. These so-called coffee experts needed to get over themselves.

‘Would you like some assistance choosing your drink Sir’ said the barista. I can offer several excellent recommendations.

‘Just something simple will be fine’ Mike mumbled. He was already flustered by the thought of the myriad of questions about to come his way. He glanced around the café. There were several chairs and tables, none of which seemed to match. This was in stark contrast to the gleaming metal counters and floors. Must be a new hipster style thing, still odd though.

‘Of course, Sir, we have some amazing choices today that I can grind for you fresh. May I recommend the Tongan, smoky and sweet? Or perhaps our Javan lava blend, it’s infused through the volcanic rocks and topped with a bitter chocolate note. Very satisfying’ he grinned. The baristas teeth looked sharp and grey; the incisors, in particular appeared almost triangular.

‘Does it taste like coffee? Mike offered sarcastically. If it tastes like coffee, I will just have that. I don’t really care.

The barista looked confused and a little hurt. ‘They are all different sir, coffee, in the right hands is like a good wine or whisky, they all have different notes depending on the blend, a different feel on the tongue’

‘The first one will be fine’ Mike sighed. This guy was going to end up wearing this coffee if he carried on.

‘Sure, no problem. The barista turned and selected a mason jar of beans from a range behind him. He popped open the lid with long delicate fingers and swirled the jar round in front of him, inhaling deeply from the rattling contents as if reviewing a good merlot. His chest audibly crackled slightly as he breathed out. Probably the unethically sourced rollups Mike thought.

The barista smiled again at Mike. ‘I just love this one though, so smoky, leathery, salty’. He closed his eyes for a second.

Mike just stared at him. He found this approach was best in dealing with people when the words that were forming in his brain were so unpleasant.

‘And what about the milk sir?’

Here we go again.

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Flash Fiction by Sandra Florence

“Tang and Atomic Fireballs”

Once we had Tang and although I never liked it, my brother and I drank it because we were told it was made for astronauts and other flyers. I remember that my family went to Vandenburg Air Force base to visit my mother’s friend Francis and her husband Major Fick. The Ficks were air force people who had travelled all over the world and seemed so exotic to me. I thought of Vandenburg AFB in a hazy blue light, of a dreaming place for rocket scientists, engineers, and astronauts.  The Ficks lived in family housing at Cape Hart. The housing was all very modest, long winding streets of small, low to the ground houses.  Houses almost like ours with its flat roof and slump block walls. I thought their home would be much grander because my father was not a Major in the air force, and we hadn’t travelled anywhere except to Nevada and over to the coast at Pismo beach. I thought of the geniuses who worked on the 86,000 acres at the base and the labs, and manufacturing hangers, where impossible to understand formulas, and fantastic-looking equipment was stored and hung, where brain-power kept the booster rockets burning, and where strange perfumes seeped into the skies, sulfuric and foul. When the day was over I imagined how the doors to hangars were shut tight and wives put on pearl earrings for their Majors, Colonels, and Generals and went to the building for cocktails and dancing.  The cocktails were named things like the Payload, Coffin Launcher, and Polar Orbit. Major Fick and my father went somewhere that night, but our mothers stayed at the house visiting in the kitchen over coffee and tea. Francis was a tea drinker. The Ficks had four children, two boys and two girls. We stayed in the bedrooms and had contests to see who could suck on their atomic fireball the longest before the heat of it became too much and one of us spit it out onto the rug. The rooms of the house were dark, and everything was a mess, clothes everywhere, toys scattered, dishes not done, beds not made. I knew what my mother was probably thinking about her best friend’s housekeeping. I knew I would hear about it on the way home. And yet, at the same time, their home was full of what was once called oriental art, beautiful hand carved sculpture of historical figures, small jade lions, woven bamboo, dragon tapestries, and paintings from their life in Taiwan.

“The Bird–Shaped Cloud”

 A bird shaped cloud drifts by with a cherub inside. Drafts of grey heat lift the tiny angel into the rafters where its wings become trapped inside and there is no getting down. The bird shaped cloud drifts through my window and a tiny bit of rain pours onto the floor where my space crawler and sky patrol flying saucers sit abandoned in the late spring light. My pajamas have space men on them and track moon dust all over the room, at night. I sleep but not without fear, not without tender tears and rowdy voices from next door, where these kids are hopping up and down on their beds. I see them through my window in the fading light; I hear their laughter and when one gets a little too rough and the other cries out and the mother runs up and yells, what’s going on? When she leaves, they pretend sleep and continue with their roughhousing but quietly in the moonlight. Occasionally my space men get distracted and turn their cameras on the window next door and it throws everything into white shadows, playing against the walls; the kids stop what they are doing and stare caught in the screen; they seem captured, afraid to move, their hollow eyes stare back as the space men move toward them on a current of air between our houses, our windows. They peer into the boys’ room. I can hear whimpering and realize one boy is crying. The older boy puts his arm around the smaller boy. After a long while their camera light begins to fade and once it does, the boys fall back onto their beds. I can no longer see them and the space men return to my room silently through the open window and they too begin to drift. They seem fatigued by this encounter. The space men beckon the cherub to hurry as they gather their instruments. The cherub is anxious, begins fluttering its wings, bustling like a tiny bird, its wings stuck in the soft cotton of the cloud. At one point the cherub flutters so hard to free itself of the cloud and falls on my bed where an invisible star burns. I am becoming warm from the heat of the invisible star, from the fluttering of cherub wings, and then suddenly, it lifts off, darts toward the growing light. One of the space men grabs the fleeing angel and hides it in his shadow. It’s too late to sleep, the firelight is upon everything and the bird-shaped cloud breaks apart. I can hear the kids next door yelling and laughing as they run down the stairs for breakfast.

______________

Sandra Florence has been writing and teaching in Tucson, Arizona for the last forty years. She taught at the University of Arizona, at Pima Community College, and in community education settings working with refugees, the homeless, adolescent parents, women in recovery, and juveniles at risk. She is the recipient of two NEH grants, The National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity, and the second in 2015 entitled Border Culture in the Classroom and in the Public Square. She has published scholarly articles on writing and healing and writing as a tool for public dialogue. She published a book of poems, entitled, The Radiant City, in 2015. In 2021, Midway Journal nominated Sandra for the Pushcart Prize for her short story “Café Metropole”.

Poems by Zebulon Huset

Transmogrifying Honey Battered

Muddily the morning crept.

Though rain often causes fowl lungs 

to top off with droplets, drowning so many 

of the raised-head dummies—

Chucky the chicken, rooster to some,

cocked his head, juked or jived

at a too-inopportune time

and startled a sting from the resting 

transmogrifying bee.

 

This was how Janet skipped 

into the scene upon waking:

the broken syringe, dangling

microscopic bits of bee belly-flesh, 

plugging the swell of purple—the sundered 

venom sac pulsing in toxins like an IV—

which caused Chucky’s clunky heart

too much issue with tissue constriction.

 

Janet wept for her perished pet,

mourned the morning, played 

devastated Dr. Frankenstein with two 9-volts

through lunchtime. Her cries even survived

as eggs and flour and honey and paprika

were whisked together for a batter

that could staunch any tears.

That would stop her tears.

 

No crying at dinner, Janet. Enough already.

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Poetry by David M. Harris

Rep. William J. Pascrell

 

Dear Mr. Pascrell:

 

Before you were the Honorable (D, NJ),

back when you taught history and psychology

at Paramus High, you were one of the foundrymen 

who melted down our formless minds and gave them

rough shape. Detail and polish were up to us.

You told a story, about leaving for the prom,

your father said, “Be careful.” Eventually,

I think, I got the point. Did any of us

understand? Later I decided we were not

meant to understand, not then, but to

ponder and find our own meanings. 

It was a rare peek into the personal.

one that other teachers never granted us.

And what was a social studies teacher doing

as one of the advisors to the high school

literary magazine? Something else to mull.

 

Changing the world, one student at a time,

must have seemed too slow. We needed

a good example, so you made yourself one.

But how different, really, is governing

from running a classroom? So much 

patient explanation, filing down rough edges

for the easier acceptance of complex machineries,

so much talking to people who won’t listen.

And the greatest failure is surrendering the effort.

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“A Mind Like a Steel Trap” By E.O. Connors

A few days ago, I scrubbed the sink clean and lifted the steel trap out. As I knocked the trap against the trash bin to dislodge the sopping wet food particles that had collected there, it occurred to me that I made an egregious error in judgment in August of 1995.

I’m quick like that sometimes.

It was three weeks after our wedding. My husband, Tim, was mercilessly scrubbing the kitchen sink of our new apartment. It was clear he was angry about something. He didn’t do anything vigorously. Except, perhaps, drink Diet Coke and program his computer. Anything that might cause him to break a sweat was anathema. Cleaning the kitchen fell into that category. 

It wasn’t laziness, exactly. He was generally tidy, avoiding the making of a mess so as not to have to clean one. But he was also raised by a lovely June Cleaver type. She kept house and said things like, “Oh, Timmy, leave those dishes for the women,” when, one year, he rinsed some mashed potatoes off his Thanksgiving plate and tried to put it in the dishwasher. 

Tim and I had already had the very first domestic squabble of our marriage that same sink-scrubbing morning. Standing in the galley kitchen in the light of the refrigerator, I plucked the orange juice carton from the door to accompany his breakfast cereal. Overnight, it would surely have settled. I didn’t want him to drink juice from the top that was too thin, nor from the bottom that was too thick. Only Goldilocks orange juice for my husband. 

So I shook it. Hard. Up and down for a solid five seconds to mix it perfectly. 

Tim’s face pinched with anger. “What did you do that for?” 

“What?”

“You just ruined it.” I looked at the carton trying to figure out what he meant. He let out a huff of disgust. “Now it’s all full of pulp and the junk that settled to the bottom. Why would you do that?” He said it with the same bewilderment and grief as though I had hit the gas pedal to commit vehicular rodent homicide on an innocent squirrel in the road.

So just before lunch when I saw him come dangerously close to breaking a sweat at the kitchen sink, I wondered, Now what?

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Poems by Kika Dorsey

Horizon

They say the closer you come to something, the further away it can seem. As if it’s all a horizon. As if the horizon could ever be your lasso, your tightrope spanning past and future, your thread to sew closed what tore. 

I’ve been so near to my father’s death that my eyes blurred with more than tears. I’ve been so far away from my children’s birth that they disappeared like March fog when the sun buckles down and does its work of rising from a line I called my life, a line I could never trace. I’ve traveled so far that nothing has looked familiar—not the white marble statues of gods, the banyan trees, the dancing Lipizzaner, the cobblestoned streets, the cock fights in jungles, the foreign seas. 

Now I am home and what is close to me presses against my legs, wraps its arms around my waist. I’ve learned that you can never know what lies behind its mystery—a day lost in the woods, a dream of galloping horses, a fire built with twigs, a funeral, a birth—everything so near it has become their flesh, their journey toward a horizon forever receding. 

 

Petroleum

1

When he was zooplankton, buried beneath sedimentary rock in Texas and Iraq, he slept like the poor merchant under threadbare sheets next to algae, on bales of straw. He awoke and woke up the bees while he took their honey. He pulled out his own rotten teeth. 

 

2

Rock has a way of condensing poverty, of solidifying the earth so that it is harder to dig our graves. Rock can press our sight with mountains against the sun, can flatten and skip on water, can crumble when the sea catches it with salt, can sail from the bully’s slingshot, can teach us to be still. 

 

3

We have always been restless. We’ve burned whale oil, then promised the whales as they sang that we’d take from stone instead. We’ve created drills that bob their heads to a ground where we have kneeled, always begging our gods for a second chance. We’ve knocked down flasks of oil from a shelf when we dreamed of wealth and cursed the son we have yet to have. We’ve awoken to spills that coated the wings of seagulls. 

 

4

When he was living with us, he promised us planes and cars and oil for our dry faces. He fueled the ships in the seas. The whales were confused about the sound of the motor. They didn’t know how to make it a percussion of their song. You see, here is the paradox of music: to write a symphony you need silence. 

 

5

There is a little girl. She has a nightlight. It’s a purple fairy with blue wings. Without it she opens her eyes to the dark and feels scared. She needs to see that the shirt draped over the chair is not a killer. She needs to see that the dark is not dark. Outside the motors of cars rumble. She wonders where they are going, why they, too, are not sleeping. She falls asleep and dreams of squirrels. She dreams of lakes. She dreams of ladders reaching so high into the sky even the birds cannot nest there. They are too busy singing.

__________

Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets.  Her books include the chapbook Beside Herself  (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections: Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Currently, she is an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Poetry by Colin Webb

Refractory
spastic filter of branches

catching dusk clouds 

 

side-swiping indiscriminate thru 

a line of others more distinct in their 

 

trajectory—

then the obstructed lengths 

 

unpossessing downhill too, or the 

bristly blind of snow up to Here

 

that’ll curb your cigarette break bound 

by slush overlooked too, and the dirty 

 

distillation of static that’ll obscure all 

the breakup songs to come 

 

straining from car’s radio 

for you to love thru

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“Dreams Come True” by P.C. Scheponik

It was an old three-story brick house

in one of America’s dying towns,

but we could afford the apartment

on the second floor.

And though it was a disaster:

the plastic Woolworth’s dish drain

melted onto one of the electric stove’s

burners, the bed’s one foot propped up

on the Bible, the fish tank with its three

inches of green water and window drapery

lying inside, drowned in algae and neglect,

and though we had to scrape and toss the

water-stained wallpaper, refresh and repaint

the entire place, to me it was the best—

with the stained-glass window that turned the

living room gold in the afternoon with its sliding

wooden doors that divided the living space into

two separate rooms.

And though the roaches finally forced us to move,

I still remember those nights, in the living room,

sitting together

on the sofa of the first living room set

we bought as young bride and groom,

so happy to be together, on our own,

living proof that dreams really do come true.

_________

P.C. Scheponik is a lifelong poet who lives by the sea with his wife, Shirley, and their shizon, Bella. His writing celebrates nature, the human condition, and the metaphysical mysteries of life. He has published six collections of poems: Psalms to Padre Pio (National Centre for Padre Pio, INC), A Storm by Any Other Name and Songs the Sea has Sung in Me (PS Books, a division of Philadelphia Stories), and And the Sun Still Dared to Shine (Mazo Publishers), Stained-Glass Faith (Alien Buddha Press) and Seeing, Believing, and Other Things (Adelaide Books). His work has also appeared in numerous literary journals. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. 

“Vignette” by Claire Fitzpatrick

The paths wove through the vignettes like veins, around the koi pond, the stone retaining walls, the avenue of white pebbled and sandstone pavers, and down to the creek, where an arched bridge linked to a small island with a treehouse encircled by hundreds of daisies. Rebecca and Stephen had no ambitious landscaping plans when she’d inherited the estate. But after close inspection, they’d discovered the bones of the existing garden, uncovered its harsh lines and soft curves, and, after three long years, had opened their botanical paradise to the public. 

Rebecca believed gardens created themselves. Where trees had grown over time and brought more shade, the plants struggling to prosper beneath were moved. Where seeds were dropped, self-sown, and thrived, they were left. Advertisement brochures referred to their garden as ‘a living work of art’. To her, the garden was a structure to sustain life and was in some ways more important than her own. And while she and Stephen won awards for their landscape designs, and were featured on gardening shows and in magazines, there was one vignette of their garden that visitors were forbidden to enter. 

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Poems by Kathryn Kopple

Epidemics 

I can’t recall why.  Or when I bought

Hippocrates’ Epidemics.  I was on  

a tangent that should have taken me east

of Athens to Perinthos on the Sea of Marmara.

To get there, I would have to stop over

in Crannon. About Crannon, I know

nothing, which is basically how I’ve

always traveled. Floundering from 

country to country.  Blind to where I was going.

After Italy, why not Hungary?

I passed the time surrounded by

Soviet architecture. Buildings

stripped of ornament uniformly at war

with old world charm.  My host, a woman

and her boy. He didn’t walk, couldn’t feed

himself.  His silence. Her patience.

I felt oddly blessed and cursed. Lightning.

I’ve been struck more than once. Spinoza’s

famous question: What can a body do?

Bite my tongue. The toll it takes

to come back from the dead.

On the phone, I hear my partner offer

his sympathies. There’s been a significant

uptick in requests for advance directives.

The neighbors left for Charlotte a week

after the schools closed. To read the mail,

we put on gloves. The house reeks of chlorine.

We’re still under orders to hunker down.

For how long, no one knows.

When this is over, I hope to visit Perinthos,

a hanging cliff-town in Turkey, overlooking

a luminous sea, harboring every

ounce of light the heavens will spare.

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