Kate Gale
Darkness Thrown Down Like a Blanket

Kate Gale - Darkness Thrown Down Like a Blanket

Poetry
Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction… Read more »
Seth Grindstaff
Fossils of Fathers

Seth Grindstaff - Fossils of Fathers

Poetry
Seth Grindstaff teaches high school English in northeast Tennessee and earned an MA in English from ETSU. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Star 82 Review and published in… Read more »
Chera Hammons
Ghazal after the Electrocardiogram

Chera Hammons - Ghazal after the Electrocardiogram

Poetry
Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Foundry, The Penn Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, Tupelo Quarterly,… Read more »
Dennis Cummings
Kool-Aid Days

Dennis Cummings - Kool-Aid Days

Poetry
Dennis Cummings lives in Poway, CA with his wife. He has sold flowers for commercial growers and shippers for the last 45 years and continues to do so. He recently rediscovered poetry after a hiatus… Read more »
Will Cordeiro
Parentheses

Will Cordeiro - Parentheses

Poetry
Will Cordeiro has published work in Agni, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Palette Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able… Read more »
Merrill Oliver Douglas
Seeks Its Own Level

Merrill Oliver Douglas - Seeks Its Own Level

Poetry
Merrill Oliver Douglas has published poems in Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Valparaiso Poetry Review, South 85 Journal, Cimarron Review and the Comstock Review, among others. Finishing Line Press… Read more »
Francesca Bell
The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market

Francesca Bell - The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market

Poetry
Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019) and the translator of Kitchens and Trains: Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals such as B… Read more »

Kool-Aid Days

Dennis Cummings

Deep then in summer, the afternoons too hot to play outside, the sidewalk hopscotch boxes were blurred pastels with glints of mica catching sunlight; the sweet, musky smell of the milkman’s leftover ice rose from the hot asphalt; a lazy breeze rolled dead bees up the driveway, the paper carcasses hollowed out. In August, a rumor spreads: the paperboy has African sleeping sickness. A boy from our street is comatose from crashing his trail bike into a stack of pipes. At the Sunbeam bakery, a girl on a field trip is scalped when her ponytail gets caught in the mixer. We spend the afternoons with curtains drawn, drinking Kool-Aid, turning the TV volume up whenever the cicadas howl like sizzling insect witches. Little sister makes blueberry muffins in her Suzy Bake Oven, we watch Queen for a Day, then General Hospital. At six o’clock, from the shaded porch, I see my older sister coming home past the Admiral Lounge, cradling a bag of Ivory soap flakes and licorice. I hear a cue ball strike two others, wolf-whistles, a bar stool scraping across linoleum; a skinny man in a gray mechanic’s jumpsuit with greasy, shiny hair makes a circle with his thumb and fingers and stares at my sister walking past. She walks in her sleep sometimes too, asking if we’ve seen her Silly Putty or sock of jacks. Once I woke with her standing at the side of my bed, a paralytic consciousness, startling beauty etched in the moonlight on her face.
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