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  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • Current Issue
    • read Issue 30
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2025
    • interview with Dale M. Kushner
    • interview with Jessie vanEerden
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • spring 2025
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews >
      • Dale M. Kushner
      • Jessie vanEerden
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2025
    • flash glass 2024
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
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  • Master of Arts in Writing Program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
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GLASSWORKS
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Flash Glass 2017 Anthology

1/1/2018

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We are pleased to present our annual flashglass anthology! Comprised of all flash works originally published online at rowanglassworks.org in 2017, this anthology is available for online viewing and for purchase in print. Copies will also be available for $5 cash at the AWP Conference and Bookfair in Tampa this March and at our upcoming readings at Rowan University.

Thanks to all our contributors for allowing us to present their work this year!
flashglass 2017

flashglass 2017

By Glassworks Magazine in flashglass

24 pages, published 1/1/2018

an anthology of work originally published at rowanglassworks.org
Find out more on MagCloud
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Whereas by Kathleen McGookey

12/1/2017

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The girl in the feather skirt gets tired of waiting for her story to start. When would the mushroomy underside of the moon explode? Darling, she writes, I’ve sold your clothes. She loves the slash and glister of her pen. By the time you read this, my ship will be en route. Here on board, gold-tasseled tablecloths sway. Petal by petal, an inchworm crosses the centerpiece of lilies and phlox. The galley door swings, dishes clink, a kettle hisses.  Sometimes she strokes the cricket in her pocket for luck. Here on board, staircases unfold into silken dark and tenderness begins at its regularly scheduled time, nothing like a coin purse snapped closed. Snowflakes fall like whispers and someone keeps shaking the globe.
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Kathleen McGookey has published three books of poems, most recently Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press).  Her work has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West.  She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.​
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She Steers Toward the Horizon by Kathleen McGookey

12/1/2017

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The girl in the feather skirt opens door number two. Behind door number one are rain and hail, tornadoes, a roiling mess.  Door number three conceals a hearse. She doesn’t mind silence, so she drives around her island.  She just got her learner’s permit. It’s slow going, but she likes the wind on her skin, how the hearse gleams like polished leather, even the steep hills with no barriers between herself and the sea. Alone on the road, the girl tightens her seatbelt as kitchen windows blink past: a woman peels carrots:  a man sharpens knives. A dog howls behind a picket fence. The girl in the feather skirt never thinks about the other doors. She hums. A door is not the story of a bright blue sky. She memorizes fractions and their decimal equivalents. She pets her skirt which she wears like an invisible shield. Like an opal, its color changes by increments, depending on the light.


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​Kathleen McGookey has published three books of poems, most recently Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press).  Her work has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West.  She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
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The Girl in the Feather Skirt Sends a Postcard by Kathleen McGookey

12/1/2017

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To Whom It May Concern: Today I plunged into the living room and the lovely bubbles of my breath rose through the crystal ropes of the chandelier. Sunlight on water makes waves like fish scales, iridescent even from underneath. The pale overstuffed couch swayed. Blurry shadows soared above the surface, calling each other with reedy, two-step notes. The windows are open but the water will not leave the house. That’s one hidden rule. Here’s another: inside my sleep I am never lonely. I’ve set out white teacups on the windowsill for us, a little trail of bones.
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Kathleen McGookey has published three books of poems, most recently Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press).  Her work has appeared in journals including Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West.  She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
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American Ingénue in Russia by Julie Gard

11/1/2017

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​Come prepared to convert the locals with your duffel bag of lipstick, ramen, t-shirts and the Good News in translation. Laugh at each challenging cross-cultural situation and tell everyone how much you love kasha. Say God loves you to the babushka who scolds you for sitting on cement, then cry as she helps you out of an open sewer grate. Embrace the homeless children who call you mildly obscene vegetable names while you feed them soup. After the near break-in, start sleeping with a bat beneath your bed. Stop sleeping. Keep your coat on at all times. Let no one in your room while you reread the book of Job. Struggle with your lust for an aging ex-con you meet at the mini-bus stop. Fall in love so hard you fall off the daybed, so drunk that soon the bedroom stops turning back into the living room. Drink Baltika No. 9 for breakfast with the shades down. Treat your sinus infection with fate. In the outdoor market, procure a wandering eye and a missing finger, a scar of unknown origin, and a knuckle prison tattoo. Eat nothing but cooked macaroni until your skin turns translucent. Teeter on spiked heels; fend off pickpockets with witchcraft. Step over the bodies by the tracks. Get on any train you want without a ticket. 

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Julie Gard's prose poetry collection Home Studies (New Rivers Press) was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award, and her chapbooks include Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) andRussia in 17 Objects (Tiger's Eye Press). Julie's poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Gertrude, Fourth River, Clackamas Literary Review, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals and anthologies. A former Fulbright Graduate Fellow in Vladivostok, Russia, she lives in Duluth and is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. www.juliegard.com
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Girl in Finger Web by Aimee Parkison

9/1/2017

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I was in a web of fingers obscuring the warehouse where girls were kept in boxes like the one I escaped. Sister lullaby singing swallowed this closeness, so male, the other body, the boy’s hand sliding across her belly, the beauty of him, not the beauty of women and girls at the abandoned warehouse where we sat with the body I thought was like the statue of David. But I kept remembering skin scratched with splinters and mites. I dug and pried. Broke my nails, fingers torn to shreds. When a board finally gave, I pulled, busted a hole, a hollow for me to wriggle, breasts and back scraping wet concrete.

It took a while before I could see again.
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Narrow crumbling concrete halls, blood on walls, I stumble. Her hands cover my eyes. Hers with others. Soon, I’m in a web of fingers obscuring, rough with dried blood—light from dusty barred windows, crates stacked on crates. Outside, sunlight, blinding white, erases the trees as birds sing to the river of the warehouse, where girls are kept in boxes like the one I escaped, sister lullaby singing.  
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Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman (FC2/University of Alabama Press 2017), winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, The Petals of Your Eyes (Starcherone/Dzanc 2014), Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone 2004) and The Innocent Party, (BOA Editions, Ltd., American Reader Series 2012). Parkison’s fiction has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. Parkison is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches fiction writing. More information about Aimee Parkison and her writing can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com.
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Extinct Carnivores by William Doreski

8/1/2017

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The diner cringes in snowfall. Parked pickups sneer as I slog to the door and peer in. The men at the counter hulk like Easter Island’s giant heads. They don’t bother to turn to watch me dripping in the doorway. Despite their hairy exteriors and filthy mouths, these men are devout churchgoers, whose Sundays yawp with hymns shaped like dirigibles and just as lofty. I want to explain to them that I once believed in both physical labor and spiritual bliss, but something underground derailed, and the blue sparks of dragging steel illuminated places I hadn’t imagined. Now I want to delve into distances brisker than the wind on the river, want to track through matter tougher and more permanent than snow. They’d laugh, of course, and look at me with dutiful Christian pity. Poor old coot, they’d mutter. Too much education for his own good. Too much mind to lose. Too many horizons bleak above his carcass as he naps. They’re right, of course, their faces brimming with health and ignorance. Better not to know how deeply the starlight despises us every night, how indifferent the winter daylight blue. And now, enveloped in snowfall, this diner sweats and smelts and crushes us all together in a scent of flesh so powerful even extinct carnivores threaten, their saber teeth glinting in the stainless landscape outside.


William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in a small house in the woods. He taught at Keene State College for many years, but has now retired to feed the deer and wild turkeys. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals and several small-press books. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Last Concert (Salmon Press).
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Persistence by Mark Trechock

6/1/2017

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The crumbling steps now lead to no one’s front door, just a miniature precipice, a leap into the slumping depression left behind when everyone had had enough of whatever it was that ground them down. Resting in the soil: shattered glass; a bent fork; the scattered shards of a dinner plate; a metal box of rain-soaked recipes.

Above, the planted trees huddle, swaying like a family around a hospital bed, waiting for the doctor’s bad news, already starting to mourn, thinking of who might take the piano and whether the cousin who drinks might want to be the last occupant, or could it be rented out to a hired hand, or could the siding be salvaged for a nephew’s barn, or whether to let nature take its course.
Still, along the unworked dirt, near what might have been the view from the kitchen window, whose maroon awning someone might still remember, the rhubarb arteries stretch out straight and grasping for space, red as the face of an uninvited guest, and carry to the extremities of life the promise of one last dessert.
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Mark Trechock lives and writes in Dickinson, North Dakota surrounded by wheat and grass and quite a few abandoned farmsteads. His poems have recently been published in Passager, Triggerfish, High Desert Journal, Jonah Magazine, Kestrel and Red Wheelbarrow.
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History by Victoria Dym

6/1/2017

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She was infamous for having whiskey in her coffee cup while teaching. Mother would most days either fall asleep on the couch after her final two cherry Manhattans of the day, which I had learned how to make for her. Or she would beat me, with a hair brush, her stiletto heel, bookend, her fist, my belt—anything that was within reach when her violent nerve was triggered. I was often blamed, for answering the telephone (usually creditors), for talking back (children should be seen and not heard), for having chicken pox, for not cleaning the floor correctly, for anything and nothing at all.
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The worst punishments were being thrown down the basement stairs (I thought I was going to die before landing hard on the cement floor), being thrown through a wall (there was a hole where I had been catapulted—a negative plaster ass cast, which never was repaired), and the day I had to place my hand intentionally in the car jam while Mother intentionally closed the car door (I lost my middle fingernail; it took 9 months to grow back, still is crooked to this day). When I was 13, she asked if I wanted to know the reason that I was born. She took me into her bedroom, squeaked open the nightstand drawer, and removed an old square cardboard box, with a cracked domed object inside. She explained that there was a hole in the diaphragm. I was a mistake. 2 years later, with a safety pin through the chest of my parakeet, Phoebe, I was warned, in Mother’s handwriting: Shape Up.
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My father died when I was 19; he was 45. My mother threw herself on top of his body and blamed herself for the cancerous end. Her drinking worsened. After college, I moved to New York. When I called her on a payphone to tell her that I was pursuing acting, she called me a slut and hung up. She threatened suicide 3 years later and I moved back to Pittsburgh. There were 10 years where I did not speak to her. The family home, she allowed to go to Sheriff’s sale, after abandoning it, not paying back taxes. The day after the birth of my daughter, 28 hours in labor, my Mother came to the hospital drunk. She told me that I had betrayed her. Four years later, I watched her have a heart attack in the E.R.. A tumor had dislocated her shoulder. She was put on morphine. She asked me if she was going to die.
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I said, yes.

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Victoria Dym is a graduate of Ringling Brother’s Barnum and Bailey Clown College with a degree in Humility, a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing Poetry from Carlow University. Her chapbook, Class Clown, was chosen as one of ten finalists in the Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest, by Autumn Hill Press, and ultimately published by Finishing Line Press in 2015. A second chapbook is forthcoming in December 2017, When The Walls Cave In, also by Finishing Line Press. Victoria lives, writes, teaches, and laughs in Tampa Florida with her cat Mook. 
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Sisters by Ann Howells

4/1/2017

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Comingled blood, dark as windfall cherries, spattered lichen-streaked stones: grandfather (dead of foolishness), still-born Baby Anne—your family plot. And you might have sprung, angle and bone, from that corner yew, dark, with dark lank hair while I was mere summer folk, city girl—pudgy, pale, whiskey-colored ringlets. But on that garland branch, we pricked thumbs, became sisters.
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Envy grew green as island pines. Your narrow saltbox: high-ceilinged rooms, chamber pots beneath iron beds, stone-floor kitchen with hand pump and black, wood-burning stove—matriarchal dragon dominating the room, captured me. Your grandmother, brown and bony as yourself, knew things. I trotted behind as she gentled Sunday’s chicken. Ax arced, shell-carved eye stilled while deranged feathers convulsed in mad, mute tarantella. I was baptized in blood. You hungered only for trolley rides, glass revolving-doors, luncheons on the mezzanine, until you turned fifteen—one umbrella step ahead as always—left for New Orleans, a married woman.

Island wives lashed tongues, raised long, red welts on your memory: Got herself in trouble. Uh-huh. I alone knew it wasn’t love or even lust that lured you; it was city lights. Had I been offered spells and incantations, I’d have gone too.


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Ann Howells’s poetry appears in Borderlands, Spillway, THEMA and in anthologies: Goodbye, Mexico and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas (Texas Review Press), Pushing the Envelope and Texas Weather Anthology (Lamar University Press) and elsewhere. She has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999, recently going digital (www.IllyasHoney.com) and adding a co-editor. Publications include: Black Crow in Flight (Main Street Rag), Under a Lone Star (Village Books), Letters for My Daughter (Flutter), and Cattlemen & Cadillacs, as editor, (Dallas Poets Community). Ann served as President of Dallas Poets Community for four years and as Treasurer for many more.
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    FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS

     


    Categories

    All
    Aimee Parkison
    American Ingenue In Russia
    Ann Howells
    Erinn Batykefer
    Extinct Carnivores
    Flash Fiction
    Girl In Finger Web
    History
    Hybrid Genre
    Julie Gard
    Kathleen McGookey
    Mark Trechock
    Micro Essay
    Noiseless
    Patient
    Persistence
    Prose Poetry
    Samuel J Fox
    She Steers Toward The Horizon
    Sisters
    The Girl In The Feather Skirt Sends A Postcard
    Victoria Dym
    Vocabulary Lesson
    Whereas
    William Doreski
    Woman Who Flies An Aeroplane


    Cover Image: "Yellow Red Wine Glasses, Paris"
    ​Roger Camp | Issue 7


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