R L Swihart loves travelling: A circuitous journey from Amsterdam to Poland and back again has just given him a few new beads on his I’ve-been-there bracelet: Aachen, Dresden, Wroclaw, etc. Recent publications include Avatar Review, Burningword Literary Journal, and Rain Magazine.
All work
Sunflowers on every other plate in every other store. From a distorting /
loudspeaker, a white sedan issues the same old slogans, /
is choking the streets with dust …
He wanted total darkness when he slept, not a crack of light. /
When he left the room, he wanted to leave without /
making a sound. …
Rain turns to sleet and pushes the other visitors inside. On the edge of the mountain eye she looks across to banks of gray snow. …
The snare can be easily drawn: a frame within a frame, a mauve-pink storybook opening onto a sea of rolling green hills. …
Instead of an onion he’d peel an orange and she’d sit and listen. Instead of a fish she’d hold up an eel or boletus and they’d end by making love. …
More from The Journal
- Postcard Prose
By Kelly Hill
Trying to wrap my mind around living on a tropical island for thirteen years and never once seeing the ocean, I stumbled through my Indonesian vocabulary to say, It’s good. It’s big.
- Travel Notes
By Sandra Larson
A dinosaur dangles over my grandson at the Field Museum near a pink thumb that pops into the prom picture of my granddaughter dressed in strapless red leaving her house in Medina …
- Travel Notes
By Megan Hallinan
The bill in question is actually a 2,000 West African franc note, and it’s the equivalent of about four U.S. dollars. A helpful sum, really, but as I clutch the weathered crinkle in my sweaty palm, its value feels as dirty as the grime that is undoubtedly being transferred to my fingers.
- Poetry
to Egg and Berry brewery, to the pack / of Czechy words I made but didn’t work / in this pink town. I’d readily go back / to your best spots, the unfired gun, that perk //
- Poetry
By Jason Warren
And if the neap tides of my beauty / sadden him, I cannot help it: / I hang high, the waxy night light …
- Poetry
By Anastasia Vassos
Three thousand ancestors ask how I straddle / the sea, a foot on either shore. //
Read more Poetry or Postcard Prose