That Certain Charm

By Rafiq Ebrahim

As a youth I came across a girl and was immediately attracted to her. I was fascinated by certain traits in her; the way she blinked her eyes, a winning smile, a twitch of her shoulder. Shyness prevented me from expressing my feelings to her. She went away from my life, but the attraction prevailed.

Forty years later, I suddenly met her. Her new image broke the bubble of fascination. I looked at myself closely in the mirror, and the bubble shattered to pieces.

Love is so fragile

           
“Wrting gives me some solace of having created something.” – the author

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Riding Motorcycles

By Dianne Moritz

Driving down Flying Point

Road today, I thought

of you and me winding

up Mount Tamalpais,

dust coating our happy lips.

I’d drape my thin arms

over your hard shoulders

and rush ahead moments:

nestling in pine shade,

deep joy echoing there.

            
Dianne Moritz enjoys capturing brief moments in time, celebrating trials, tribulations, and beauty of life. She dreams of publishing a book of all her drabble.

Waiting for the Trustafarian Migration

By Chip Houser

Trees creak in the steady wind rushing off the foothills.

Trustafarians dash from coffee shop couches into the streets to spin like bearded dust devils, worshipping the wind. They call the winds chinooks, just like the locals, not that they’ve met many of those. Rare birds, those locals.

The trustafarians zip-tie sheets to ankles and wrists and leap into the wind. Sheets snap taut, ballooning like 300-count bellies, lifting the trustafarians in elongated arcs down the streets.

Soon, fresh powder will lure the trustafarians to the slopes and the locals will emerge, reclaiming their streets and coffee shops until spring.

           
Chip maintains his cynical optimism—about the world, its people and animals, our collective future, all that weighty darkness—by banishing his less charitable thoughts directly into fiction. That way he can channel his good energy into his amazing wife and their several four-legged joy monsters.

Converse High Tops

By Mark Tulin

A worn pair of Converse High Tops
drape from a solitary wire
where the crows balance
and most people ignore.

I see the sneakers hang in the day
and upside down like a bat at night.
Happily and hopefully stuck,
a symbol of teenage revolt.

They look like a size ten.
I wonder what teenager wore them.
They still have tread on their soles,
just frayed around the edges.

It must have taken the kid hours to do,
choosing to immortalize such a thing.
Wanting to be free like a sneaker,
looking down at the world from a solitary wire.

         
Mark’s poetry and stories are his most effective ways of expressing himself. His upcoming poetry book, Awkward Grace, will be out in early 2020.

Retreat

By Anna Clark and John Adcox

A
glacier
melts into the sea,
arctic ice, now silver stream.
Where creatures dwell no home will be.
From snow’s death knell, we hide, we flee,
while from this blight we retreat, and ourselves tell,
‘It’s them, not me.’ Yet conscience tolls tomorrow’s bell.
To that peal, will we listen, or sit and watch the glaciers glisten?
A chilling sight is the flow of melting ice from long ago. What stays hidden
from our eyes is the overflow of oceans’ rise, and it’s our children who pay the price.

            
Anna Clark is a writer, seeker, guide and sustainability enthusiast. John Adcox is a poet and literature professor. As neighbors, they like to get together to write, drink tea and contemplate their corner of the world: Little Forest Hills in Dallas, Texas

Scene from an Art House Festival

By Anonymous

Before speaking, the auteur took a deliberate drag from his vape pen. “My film,” he began. “Is an exploration of certain uncertainty …”

The host nodded, pretending to understand, much less care.

By now the crowd had dwindled to a loose smattering of those who had nothing better to do.

           
Anonymous writes to remember.

Mycelium Overrule

By Alexander Pyles

Growth. This is all we know. Our singular purpose.

Our fellows were swiftly cut down. Parts of us hauled away to unknown destinations. Vaguely, we felt them prodded, dissected under cold suns.

Our polyps shorn. Our silent screams reverberating down our trembling anchors in the dirt. The invaders did not understand us. We were simply resources. Our cries hopeless.

We released our legacy. Our desperate faith taken flight on strong winds. These spores will poison those who dared carve our flesh. Our children will cultivate the invader’s bodies, thrive. They will prepare them for our second coming.

A new fruition.

           
Alexander Pyles holds an MA in Philosophy and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. His short-story chapbook , Milo (01001101 01101001 01101100 01101111), is due out fall 2019.