INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Laszlo Slomovits
Alan Britt
Tolu Ogunlesi
Paul B. Roth
Gerald Clark
Dike Okoro
Jerry Blanton
Felino Soriano
Joanie Freeman
Steve Barfield
Shuta Crum
Running Cub
Odimegwn Onwumere
Duane Locke
Chris Lord
Fred Wolven
Nona Giorgadze
Bobby Steve Baker
Brandon S. Ray
satnrose
Serena Trome
Paul Handley
Kanev Peycho
George Moore
R. Jay Slais
Carol Smallwood
One woman wearing only a thin print dress, barefoot,
infant slung on her hip, stares a young severely
weathered face
across an expansive concrete beach to a body of water.
An algae bloom chokes all other ocean life. Through
the cloudless sky
unmanned drones are flying in formation. They land on
the water,
seeming like mosquitoes, but there are no mosquitoes.
There are no insects, no ants, no highly facultative
organisms, all reduced to inorganic molecular dust.
Are the planes on our side, or the other side?
Who is the other side? When did the war begin?
The sun is glowing golden on the woman's leathered face.
The child is motionless.
In the heat waves the drones bob up and down like
dolphins.
Nothing left to kill, no houses, no foliage, just one
woman and a baby.
The woman turns the baby to the dolphins, "Look! See
the fish."
The baby does not look, does not see, swaddled almost
lifeless.
The wind ripples the woman's dress in dusty gusts
that mute the color of the dying light to dull brick
red reflected
in dead water now the color of sloughed menstrual blood.
The dolphins float up on their white bellies.
But the woman has not sloughed blood for months,
and the sun will light the earth for 5 billion more
years.
Bobby Steve Baker, Lexington, Kentucky