enters through double glass doors.
Her body leaning, red crochet crowning her head.
Dangling tubes connect to the green oxygen tank
she’s pulling with her right arm. In her left hand,
an old worn sax case.

Trumpet and bass call to each other, bebop, bebop.
Rhythms fly into the air from JP’s electric guitar.
Fingers swim across the black and whites.

Sitting next to me, she sways
to Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology.”
Then the MC announces:
And now we’ll join Ruby, playing Green Dolphin Street.

Slowly she opens the patinaed clasp
and lifts a worn brass sax; one arm steadies her tank.
The wheels clank-clack up steps onto the stage.

She slips her mouth on the reed. Strong vibrations
build to a crescendo. The room becomes the music.
People tap. Their earlobes dip to the offbeat.

Slinging her sax aside, tubes and tank invisible,
Ruby sings like a yellow-tipped whooper swan
flying.

Norma Bradley

Dear Editor,

The numbers you cite in your post-election article of November 8th tingle my bullshit detector. I understand your passion for the subject about which you expound, but not every reader is as gelatinously swayed as you might have hoped. Your “fuzzy math,” to quote a hero of yours, is just not up to the task of calling into question two centuries of unbroken small “d” democracy. But I realize that fact steps on your sound-bite. “Rigged election,” is a loaded phrase. I suggest you bolster your source material before shooting it off.

Regardlessly,
John Q. Public

Peter Newton

an ancient Norse saga piling up on the photocopier
illustrated with animals that might be extinct already
or maybe just manifestations of the id

charcoal sketches
of my doppelganger
blink once for yes

Melissa Allen

trying to translate from blood to water and back again
as if I hadn’t been living with wolves all these years
yes, I’m in therapy / did you just hear that howl?

better off waiting
for the ice to crack
cocktail moon

Melissa Allen

blacked out halfway through the cracked teacup
next thing I know staring at me from a complete place setting ($49.95)
the whole gang of disciples with fishnets

• bullet points
• in times new roman
• dream journal

Melissa Allen

Peter Newton

It’s July and you’re dreaming the coastline. You’re on a road beside a ticking bed of reeds. A car approaches. A dot hits the windscreen. Flies through haze. Crash-lands in a verge. You run. Your heart is exploding. Your eyes seek a victim. You find it. Pick it up. A female reedling. Still warm as the landscape. Beady eyes shut. Scratchy claws all clenched. You clasp her frailty, as if pity would save her, but a jet of her blood from a hidden vent sprays. It fills your palm. Squirts lines on your forearm. Splashes your T-shirt. Salts your lips. Stings your eyes. It bursts into vapour. An atmospheric blackout. Clouds the summer. Blocks the sun. Slaps your face.

behind the pines
a bleeding sunset . . .
the future howls

David Alcock

Last night. On my back in water. Near the beach that we went to years ago. Before dawn and the purple autumn curdles. Pines rupture gloom like the points of a saw. Warmth dissolves and a memory re-opens. Fingertips flinch from an unstitched wound. Rags of flesh. Soft drumming of heartbeat. I try to scream but I can’t even moan. My brain hooked. I’m pulled to a jetty. I see someone else. Painted nails on her bump. Creak of wire. Slowing clicks of a fishing reel. Someone laughs. Moonlight coils on your club.

between your lips all shadow and starlight
eyes flicker
like fires on a reef

David Alcock

I suppose I knew. Some bugs eat paint. Having put the finishing touches on a watercolor. I fell asleep.

The chanting continued. In the temples. And the same stars passed over Gautama. Passed over me.

Morning awakened. The grass green town. Still. Chanting.

I rose. The painting on a table. Riddled with spaces. Where eyes and flowers once shone.

Robert Witmer

Diana Webb