Online Issues
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Imagining Commonalities
"Rooftops, Brooklyn" Fidelia Bridges, 1867
by Debasish Mishra
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For reach one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
–Samuel BeckettImagine we’re all clinging to one breast
one mouth must withdraw for the other
and the other for another
so that the milk is shared
and also the lactating mother
the mouths deprived of milk
drink the tears till another turn of the gyre
we’re siblings for more than one reason
our cravings for love and carvings on skin
architecture of the same school
and our knowledge of universal truths
are derived from the same hearth
of history and habit our methods
of killing a mosquito and of making
love are tangents of a fixed
diameter our despair is tinted
like tears and our hopes are milk-white
the gloss of an undying flashlight
Debasish Mishra,
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Dissolution
art by Zizanie
by Maria Kassandrou
I click my mouse from time to time.
Not because I always do something. Sometimes I click randomly on the screen, in order to give sonic signs of life; somewhere without consequence—without buttons or links. I stare at the open pdf file, postponing into eternity the reading of that document.
We’re both extremely quiet, each immersed in our own world. If we didn’t click the mouse buttons occasionally, the whole day would just pass over us. As if we were asleep,
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Taken
"All As We Wish" art by Edward Lee
by Aaron Sandberg
In the driveway, your brother will be burning ants—magnifying glass a tool he will choose to use in other ways than good. He will not come in peace. You’ll read your book on the couch in numbness wishing the universe would nudge you. You’ll wish for wanting. You’ll get your wish.
Above the skyline, a mothership will eclipse the sun, focus a beam, explode the little living things beneath. Some will be spared and abducted. Irony will not be lost. -
The Garden
“The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku
by Jessica Payne
Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within. -
Alzheimer’s Duet
"Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey" Auguste Renoir, 1883
by Geoffrey Babbitt
“Using logic and reason to explain… is likely to make them agitated…. Instead, the best thing you can
do is not try to bring them back into reality.”—dailycaring.comI:I remember looking out our car window on the way there. It was early summer, and a whole meadow
was covered with blue wildflowers.Father:I want to go to the cabin now and sit on the back deck.
Not sure whether they were blue flax,
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Two Flash Fictions
"The Libertine" painting by JoAnneh Nagler
by Stephen Tuttle
Short-Term Planning
Once upon a time, a man looked into the future and saw that it didn’t include him. He wasn’t old, except by the standards of the very young, and had planned on many more years of good health. When he told the woman sitting at the kitchen table with him, she nodded solemnly to indicate that she already knew. He asked: What should I do, now that I have so little time to do it?
