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I felt nothing, which was cool, totally cool with me. For my blood was cola.

Diane Kirsten Martin

Lambert started to cry and said he was sure there was a God.

I felt awful about imposing on him, but I was desperate to see the Derby.

I saw her bed wasn’t slept in and knew—something had happened.

Why had she asked him to come along, someone she did not even know?

Vita brevis, source of all not enough. Light leaked from stopped time.

Their hands were acting as airfoils, producing lift, not drag.

She had instinct for seeing what she could make happen.

She pointed to the end of the driveway. “Is he yours?”

The intention of the writer is irrelevant to the success of the story.

I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared.

Home, I thought. This was the new country I had been yearning for.

The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.

Lufthansa lifts off under me. The set sun disinters, a fanned cinder.

An owl, as large and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.

An owl, as large
and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.

we’ve walked the streets: candied apples on sticks, fish heads.

The surface of night is disrupted. Ripples cross the neighborhood.

O Fatima if only you would lean my way my heart would quiver.

The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye.

I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains, since there is no safety in numbers.

I pictured myself as a chart inside her head. Two sides: good and bad.

Premonitions return to me like a carrier pigeon, disaster strapped to its leg.

They couldn’t go to the Manson family caves because of nuclear radiation.

There is the ghost of a child in me. It longs to die, so afraid of living.

Nine day-care children are out for a walk on a winter morning.

“Tell me that everything will be okay,” I whispered to the photo.

Who will call out as I descend, the world blurring by in sleep and despair?

Sue Mell