WEEKEND
by Lizi Gilad

The kitchen window is dusty and smudged,
streaked like my mother’s buttered Pyrex dish
the moment before she poured in brownie batter.
I’ll clean the window with crumpled newsprint
the way my father taught me. But the dish soap distracts
me with its Mykonos blue. And so does the pineapple
on my counter, sheathed like an armadillo, so solemn
in tufted headdress, doing nothing but ripening.

 

AGELESS
by Andrea Uptmor

I have had anxiety since I was first born. First it was restaurants, then malls, then school, then cars, airplanes, and elevators. When I turned thirty-two I decided to just stay home. I spent my days alone, windows covered with a thick grey fabric.

Some years later, I read Ageless by Suzanne Somers and I realized it was all hormones. Something opened up in my brain and I put on my coat, walked outside.

I walked to a pay phone to find Suzanne Somers’s phone number so I could thank her, but she wasn’t listed. So I walked back home.

 

IN PRAISE OF A CEREAL ADDITIVE
by Tom Deiker

Oh, butylated hydroxotoluene,
Our butylated hydroxotoluene,
Our safe and secure securer,
Our safeguarding, guardian angel,
You preserve and protect us
(And our reticuloendothelial system)
Now and forever!

—

 

Lizi Gilad has work published or forthcoming in Melusine, Boston Literary Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, and others. When not gazing at pineapples, she blogs at www.lizislifelines.wordpress.com.

Andrea Uptmor is a fiction writer living in Minnesota.

Tom Deiker’s 70+ articles, essays, short fiction and poetry have appeared in several dozen publications. Of his 85 plays, 35 have received 61 stagings by theatres in 13 states.