Poem: Free Verse, I’m Chemical by Da’oud De Lane

A sheet of ripe skin conceals me. Tight, plump, and profuse, it will never feel as ravishing as it does covering me now.

My blood is pulsating, livid, and loud. I’m simply cultivated by the material of bone. I am overflowing with life, blossoming, maturing, and just yet to reach my prime. Study me, capture my essence and nature before I fall and expire. What am I to do with all this chemistry?

Prose: Fiction Short Story, Praise to Death

by Ayanna Lonon

Well let me tell you, I ain’t never known no good lady to die in Church. I ain’t never heard of nobody doing it at all, and I wouldn’t believe Odelia’d done it ‘cept for I was sat behind her on first Sunday and watched it happen read more in the 47th edition of the iliad, Flourish

Since the first time she showed up to 1st Methodist, I dreaded every moment of that damned circus act- the stomping, the hollering; it was a mockery of my religion. I’d been sitting in the same spot on the fourth row every Sunday for seventeen years and she, on her first day, sat in the third. Every Sunday, a different hat, bobbin and tiltin, but never falling off.

On the first Sunday of July, when that hat started to really lean to the side as she stomped, clucked, fluttered, I thought I might get to witness a miracle. And when the brim of the hat was touching the blade of her left shoulder, I sat up straight to bear witness . . .