real Hollywood outcalls by Paul Murray

Heavy Sighs (an imitation of Juvenal) by Martin Heavisides

Credo

As a psychologist, I have seen 1000/attempts to avoid responsibility for/a troubled child./"It's a chemical imbalance; it's the schools;/it's the medication; it's uncle Harry."

The Dragon

When you first told me about/the dragon tattoo, I didn't/believe you were preppy 101,/clean cut in your wool sweater/and dockers. I wasnFt sure/I wanted to see your legs,/lean and pale;

Musings chanced upon in the quiet of Inniscrone

real Hollywood outcalls

Kelly's Orchard

Hardball

Evans

He has always enjoyed jigsaw puzzles, and now that he has the time, he spends hours a day at them. The rec room isn't particularly large, and arguments often break out over who gets what tabletop, but since you can't very well move a half-finished puzzle and the other half of the pieces, he gets the same table every day, a long one in the comer with enough room to set up a 1000 piecer. He stalks around the table, searching for this or that flower clump or shingle or shadow, and when he tires, he sits, plotting his next move for when he's got his gas up again. Overhead, a fan waves and games of rummy and backgammon shuffle around.

Selkie

The Star of Hope was dangerously low in the water when Joseph felt the tug on the net. He called for Mac to help him haul it. The wind blew capricious while the moon skittered on the breakers regardless. Joseph tasted salt in his mouth as he brought her aboard.

She looked up at him from the deck, with the wide face of a girl. Mac shouted to be heard over the wind. Selkie? He wanted to know if they should throw her back. Joseph shook his head, stood, and turned the boat for home. Later that night, in his cottage near the harbor, she slipped out of her skin, folded it carefully and handed it to him.

Mr. Wyandotte by Phoebe Wilcox

Photophobia by Niall Joseph

The River Thief by Tom Sheehan

High Water

Willy was born delighted in the middle of a rainstorm that threatened to flood the root cellar where they were hiding from the lightning. She had wide-open blue eyes. Her tiny expressive face soundlessly oohed and aahed and grimaced and startled with each feeling from the very beginning and, soon, she had a coo of contentment that nurtured her mother and then a three-tone song of a laugh that always made her siblings smile. Thunderstorms and floods threatened them so often but Willy's birth let Mama engage with them easier from then on.

The River Thief

English Wells fought the Pumquich River for forty years, moving his will ever by degrees at it. "By God, Miriam," he often said to his wife, "I'll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work for, you get. You get what you work for." English, lacking funds or worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the river, to push his small estate out over the river#s run, to claim energy's due.

Chosen

Kundalini Rising

Doctoring the Blues

Sailing the Prairie

Asian Girl Pin by Paula Ray

Grandmother tugged the rope handle attached to the retractable attic-stairs. Pink fiberglass fragments and fluffy gray lint fell out. I gazed up at the rafters, staring at the ventilation fan, which was slowly spinning as heat rose. The eerie scraping of metal against metal made me cringe. It was mid-August, one hundred and two degrees outside. I knew the attic would be at least ten degrees hotter, but up I went, the obedient child.

Kundalini Rising by J M Patrick

At night, I hear him pacing upstairs in his apartment. I want to open his veins and suck this from his blood. I want to open his hands and trace feather-light lines. I want to break his bones and rebuild them. I want to push his head back and open his mouth; I want to fill him like a wineglass to the brim, drink from him.

Shopping by Christopher Morrow

Lizard Love by GC Smith

*Two mallards* by Neil Dyer