- Continental Club Graffiti by Linda East Brady
- Drug Therapy by Wanda Fries
- Full Circle by Jéanpaul Ferro
- Dirty Feet by Dennis J. Humphrey
- Displacement by Allen Lee Ireland
- The Heat Sign by Michael Neal Morris
- At the Lake by Doug Tanoury
- Day One as Mom, Unsettled at Home by Susan M. Henderson
4th Quarter - 2003
FICTION
The two-stalled can wasn't much bigger than a walk-in closet. An obvious bleach-blonde reapplied her lipstick in the mirror. Pearl nodded at her, giving a glance to her own reflection -- hair still big, mascara still strong despite the heat.
As the drug enters the system, the crippled hearts will be silted like fern leaves or curled shells into layers of carbon, no longer fact, but artifacts, to be dug out in the future and examined through a magnifying glass for the stories they can tell.
And how I hold her in my arms, hold Carla's soul like
she's heroin in this needle, shivering, quivering in my hand,
rubber band thickening the veins of my bicep for the high;
I need her that much!
"I scrubbed and scrubbed.
They won't come clean," she says in that small voice
she uses when she is pretending to
be helpless as a child. I think that they
look clean enough.
Man made a house for God as high in air
As He resides in human consciousness.
Man made a house for Lucifer as well,
As low as hate and evil live in us.
Each year I remember a sign
outside an old Baptist church
that read, “You think it’s
hot here?”
And there is a certain point
Way out the channel, where the freighters steam,
Where a thin band of milky white atmosphere
Separates the pale blue of sky
From the deep blue lake
We had been home only hours. I didn't dare sleep. Fatigue couldn't compete with the fear of being completely in charge of this new baby. He lay against me, fidgety but stiff. He didn't fall into my arms the way other people's babies seemed to. I felt stretched out, but nothing hurt yet. I was still too numb.
