LIFTOFF
by Lyndon Seitz
Artwork by Jennifer Daltorio
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/liftoff-audio.mp3]

I want to take the cards I’ve been dealt
And fold them into little paper helicopters,
Shooting red diamonds and black spades for bullets
Out of a numerical machine gun.

I will see the looks of astonishment,
Raised eyebrows, and heavy breathing
And know that whatever rough felt-top table game they were playing,
I won.

 

 

 

SOME WOMEN ARE NOT MEANT TO HAVE CHILDREN,
by Paulina Jaeger
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Some-women-are-not-meant-to-have-chi.mp3]

the doctor told Adriana, but she left the pharmacy anyway and had fourteen before she was fifty-two. All but one died. She named the final child Adriana, after herself, and some said the little girl was simply Adriana all over again. One nurse dazedly declared that the older Adriana began to lose her finger and footprints as soon as the conception. When the baby emerged, all of Adriana’s flesh was smooth, lineless. Like an eel’s. A truth is that Adriana lied on the hospital bed with her feet flat and her knees high and fell asleep just before the final push. Her baby was blind for the first few weeks of its life. The older Adriana was dissolved and scattered before the younger began to see large forms and shapes, let alone ash.

 

 

 

DUSTIN
by Paulina Jaeger
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Dustin.mp3]

There is a place on the other side of nowhere where the planets spin at a visible rate, clock their hours like waitresses who, on seeing the lemon symphony someone left, pick up the flower and make for the highway at once. Someone is waiting with their arms open. Someone is blowing a kiss at a stream. Someone is fishing alone.

In the fields where strawberry colored wildflowers grow, and the blueviolet ones that look like descendants of thistle with their delicate, scraggly beauty, thick head; those smell like sweet Oregon strawberries, but in Oregon it’s winter, and whoever can imagine a field without lilies? Lilies. Lilies.

 

 

 

 

SQUIRREL
by Joscelyn Willett
Artwork by Joscelyn Willett

He warns anxiously,
claiming what’s his.
I walked home the other day
after dark,
wishing I had done the same
and had my nut to show
for it.

 

 

 

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Lyndon Seitz is an eternal student of poetry from central Massachusetts who likes thinking just as much as he enjoys writing. He has been published in several journals online and in print.

Jennifer Daltorio is a Massachusetts resident whose book worm tendencies have led to wild imaginings and creative birth through pen and paint.

Paulina Jaeger was born in Oregon. She is excited to live in Costa Rica this fall. Her poem “How Life Isn’t Fair” won an Oregon Poetry Association “New Poets” first prize and appears in their journal Verseweavers. Her flash fiction is forthcoming in SAND.

Joscelyn Willett lives and writes in California. She would like to come back as a squirrel in her next life. But only if they cozy up with rabbit friends in shabby chic treehouses while sipping honey tea and munching on macarons.

 

 

 

 

 

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