Poetry
Marshland Dusk - John Philip Johnson
The Wedding Room - Shanan Ballam
Fiction
Angle Side Angle - Mary Lynn Reed
There Is Always More Work to be Done - Dave Barrett
The Relief Printer - Jessica Rae Hahn
Reviews
The Nine Scoundrels by Deanna Reiter
Whistling Shade's Literary Cafe Review
Memoir
My Meeting with Mengele - Maryla Neuman
Essay
Eating Your Words in a Prague Cafe - John-Ivan Palmer
John Dos Passos, a View from Left Field - Hugh Mahoney
Lost Writers of Minnesota: Clifford D. Simak - Joel Van Valin
Columns
Shading Dealings - Race-based Literary Journals
The Wedding Room Minnetonka Cave Shanan Ballam They shut down the lights to demonstrate darkness. I put my hand before my face and all I know are gobs and globes of black. This is the Wedding Room. I know that two feet away is a slick stalagmite, the groom, thick as a tree trunk and gold. His stalactite bride stretches her spine above him. Splats of small water drip from her tongue to his eyes. My hand swipes the dark near my hip where your hand always waits, but you have moved in this thick blackness. I make my lips and tongue form slowly and silently over the word flowstone, flowstone, the shiny glaze of lime that smoothes itself across these stones so cold and deep in the earth. Like us, the pair is only split by a few feet of thin space. But it will take thousands of years for them to touch. |
Shanan Ballam’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Tar River Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cream City Review, and Calyx.