We are pleased to present our annual flashglass anthology! Comprised of all flash works originally published online at rowanglassworks.org in 2019, 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 San Antonio, Texas this March and at our upcoming readings at Rowan University.

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

Then there’s the time I went to Books and Books in Coral Gables
            to see Howard Nemerov, and though I can’t remember anything
he read—either it wasn’t memorable, or my memory is on the loose in
            someone else’s mind—I remember the wine & cheese afterward
upstairs where I expected Jacob Marley or Boris Karloff to emerge
            from the bookshelves. Anyway, I walk up to Nemerov with a plastic
cup of wine and a paper plate of cheese chunks and tell him I loved his reading--
            which was a lie—I said Mr. Nemerov—I thought the Mr. was
appropriate out of respect though I learned later from a friend that the old
            coot had been grabbing the asses of half the women at the reading,
but it was Mr. Nemerov, and I told him I had a horrible job selling
            messages-on-hold to telephone companies that sold telephone systems
and earned fifty-thousand dollars a year, which was pretty hot shit,
            especially back then, especially for a guy like me, no college, no trade,
just a high school diploma, and I said Mr. Nemerov, should I quit my job
            and concentrate on poetry? He leaned forward like a lumbering Dean
Martin with his bloodshot eyes and alcohol breath, and just looked at me
            like I was a fucking idiot.

My sanity hangs from a single, brilliant, dew-soaked spider thread.
 
I did not ask for this. You did not ask for this. These hurricanes of fury and passion and wreckage and fear which have no end. Ahead of the eye, walls of gray rain march forward, fierce and unrestrained. Behind, tornadoes and bolts of fire descend from the angry sky, shocking the land and its overflowing waters.
 
In between the storms, the sun shines, and we rebuild.
 
Standing behind the big chair in our living room, I watch, through little pools of tears, as the raging hand of mania strangles you. And I curse the sadness I know will follow and try to drown you. The shadowy, gnawing beast has come out of hiding and has swallowed you whole.
 
I have lost you again.
 
As despair pulls me under, a bird catches me and lifts me back up. Through the window next to me, he lands at the feeder. A sun-yellow body draped in a night-black hood. His beauty is so stunning, so perfect, he is all I can see. My eyes fill again with little pools. How can there be so much beauty in the middle of so much pain?
 
Yet here he is. Right now, in this moment, with this pain.
 
Having had his fill of sweet nectar, he disappears over the tops of the trees, carrying the bright ​sun and dark night with him as he steals away.
 
And leaves a little piece of sanity behind.

Tía María’s face fell down on a hot July day while she changed clothes in front of a window fan. Abuela called and I could hear her frantic voice over the phone as I stood close to Mami. We rushed to the subway. I was five so I imagined we were going to Tía María’s apartment to help pick up the pieces of her face and put them back in the right spots. I touched my nose, mouth, eyes. It would be funny to mix everything up. Mami cursed the heat, the subway, the city.

The doctor used the word droop when talking about the right side of Tía María’s face. But in Spanish things don’t droop. They fall down. And that’s how it looked to me – eye, cheek, mouth all fallen down, down.

“Can you not smile at me, Titi?” I asked.
A tear ran down her paralyzed cheek.

Abuela blamed it on the fan because cool air on a hot body is dangerous. She also believed night air was full of diseases and that people could make you sick with the evil eye.

Mami wanted to know where that bastard Hector was. Hector was Tía María’s husband and a minister.

“He is down in the Bowery saving the souls of whores just like Jesus Christ did,” Tía María said.

“He is a man of God,” Abuela said. “He will pray and María will get better.”

The doctor looked at us in a way that made me think he did not like us much. It made me sad. “Have you experienced any recent head injuries?” he asked.

“Like being pushed out of a moving car?” Mami said.

“I slid when Hector made a sharp turn,” Tía María said.

“Or being shoved down a flight of stairs?” Mami said.

“She tripped. Always so clumsy,” Abuela said.

“And how about being knocked to the floor?” Mami said. Then she raised her hand before anyone could speak. “Oh, yeah... sure. You fainted.”

Abuela caressed her daughter’s ruined face. “It was the fault of the fan. Cool air on a hot body can be deadly. Hector is a man of God. He will pray and María will get better.”

Mami cursed. The doctor left. And I prayed that my Tía María would someday smile at me again.

I. Atoms and words combine themselves into complex structures: molecules and sentences, poems and beings. These pieces hold a limited amount of meaning alone, but it is only through the interconnected relationships of these base elements that they can ever become alive. To break apart these structures is to kneel before a pile of discrete pieces of information. A cell is defined by its purpose for the body as a whole, a word by the body of work. There is value in the syntax, the order, the configuration. Rearrange the elements and the whole thing may fall apart.

II. Language evolves. As time goes on, a combination of sounds mutates into something that doesn’t resemble itself anymore. Every time a sequence is copied, it brings the threat (or blessing) of alteration. Without this swerve, every product created by nature or poet would be a mere copy of the original.

III. A good poem already exists. The writer can imitate it, ensuring that she never rises above her predecessors and lives her life a parrot. She can rebel against it, at the risk of estranging her readers and defining her work by spite. Or she can take that work and distort it slightly, expand the boundaries to her advantage, test the limits without going too far off the edge. Nature works the same way; she is a fine poet.

IV. Poems adapt to the fitness of their environment. As language evolves, the values of art must shift as well, else they will become extinct due to the meager supply of fitting words. The ideal poetic line is a genome, manipulated by entropy until an infinite series of variables miraculously synchronize with its surroundings, and it thrives. It’s hard to watch old words die. They don’t represent the language of the listeners anymore, but they preserve the language of the writers. Leave them behind when history turns its page. They will be fine.

V. Poetry is a ring species. It is tempting to categorize history into eras. A segment of time is defined by one concept, and then in one single strike of the clock is defined by another. The division of history into Renaissance and Shakespearean and Romantic erases the links in between that hold them together. Change is a gradual process. The process isn’t over yet. Every individual moment is an era, defined by itself.

VI. Think about the music of the spheres. The universal symphony is never over; as one tune ends, an elided cadence begins a new melody, recombining the same notes into an impossible number of variations. The last line of one poem is the opening to another. As long as art continues, it can’t really fail; even a poor piece of writing or a mislaid tune may serve as inspiration for the next. The only mistake is to stop creating. Everything finds its natural place in the end.

When my children were young, when I was run ragged working, dieting, and binge eating while sparring itinerant depression, my mother sent me crisp $20 bills with the note, "for the grave."

She meant her mother's grave—my Noni, toughest broad I'd ever known, the one who loved me most fiercely. I lived near Noni's cemetery in New Jersey, but Mom had moved 2700 miles across the land. In spring, she wanted me to plant fresh annuals on Noni's resting place; in December, to lay a plastic holiday wreath; at Easter, to pound a palm cross into the ground; in fall to put potted purple mums in front of the stone where it said Josephine Marco.

Some days, some years, I did those things, stopping first at the nursery or supermarket with my two sweet and curious boys, then parking along the narrow-edged cemetery lane. There, I'd unload the older boy along with his bright green shovel, my hammer, a pink water can, and bundle the smaller boy into his stroller.

Some days, some years, we snapped pictures—me, hair astray, wearing a dirt-smudged too-tight top, and two smiley boys, not at all bewildered to be posing in that quiet, verdant place, next to a granite marker.

When my boys were nearly men, I found those photos in my dead mother's nightstand, and was sickened with a sharp stab of guilt.

Although I always said, "Yes, I took care of it," when Mom asked if I did the grave, what she never knew is often, I didn't. I hadn’t. Instead, the twenties went toward a toddler's eyeglasses, my therapist bill, ingredients for ice box cake—the bananas-graham crackers-pudding dessert Noni fed her grandchildren every Sunday. 

I never confessed because it didn't feel like cheating, then. It felt like a kind of fierce love. Today, Mom is buried nearby, and I'm not so sure.

with two lines after Ursula K. Le Guin’s "The Left Hand of Darkness" 

Now nameless I will go seek my death. I enter as the rest have, bumping into those around me, randomly, entropic. But this is no closed system. Faced with two choices, I decide left. The path is narrow, cold. A dead end-- 

I see myself, the self I was when I was eight, running from mother, her chasing me through the stalks with a bottle of medicine, telling me with her hinting southern voice darling this’ll help you let me blow your nose you have a fever--

I double back, take the right, and for hours (or else, weeks, my beard thickens with each frozen step), I wander through the dark maze. When hungry, I shuck an ear of raw corn, drop to my knees and sink my teeth--

There’s a long straight hall (if one can call a row of barren field between stalks of decaying corn a hall) with no turns. The corn here wilts, limp as a cow’s utters. Too thick for water to reach. Dirt is dust. I delve further--

​An open area, the size of my first apartment. Myself, now nineteen, stampedes into where the living room would be. I am master-fate, I am minotaur-breath, I am become death, destroyer of plastered walls. My fist meets white barrier--

My own footsteps, missteps, places I was lost, couldn’t find my way out. I’m eleven and I push my brother down the stairs, I’m walking through desolate streets with Patrick at four a.m., I can’t breathe. I try, find-swallow empty words--

​In another dead end, I see my first dog, Binky, named because I was an infant, obsessed. I follow her through mindless turns of the maze, she pleads with me Where have you been why aren’t you here I protected you I protected you I--

There’s my father, from what I remember. He sips a beer, I’m seven, I ask him for a taste. He looks to see my mother isn’t around, says we’re all dead ends. We who kill ourselves dwell here. I grip the glass and open wide--

​Corn grows stale. Each day I chart the stars from within the maze, a makeshift sextant borne of corn stalks, try to get a sense of direction. I remember being seven, hiding from my aunt between soft rolls of clothes. She calls my name--

Winter enters the maze. I wear a coat of corn, my hair married to icicles. I see my grandfather Christmas morning. I got a camera that year, it was the last time I saw him. He whistles a tune with no rhythm, he calls me Jimster I called him--

It’s been years. I forget my name, shrug it off like so many coats. Each turn feels familiar. I unexist, I’ve always been here. Find me there, muttering incoherencies to myself, beard sticky with corn juice, running into each solitary dead end--

When the dying time came, like a gavel struck demanding pallor and ash, you receded from a house to a room to a box, destined for a closet sharing flat caramel carpet with these feet. You are boxed and taped and I am full—possessing your images, your proof’s—of jury seats, divorce decrees, of love letters resealed by time, of certificates of birth and fevered secrets poked in drawers—of Jew and Black etudes—clamoring, when all I crave is erudition; your counsel of skirt hems and bad men, of how many bags form a lazy man’s load, up these stairs, up my steps and not your own. Where do you end/ I start, orphaned ridiculously old, mourning this closeted quay at which I sometimes cower; confused sole cantor seeking words, rustling sermons that append pogroms, lunch counters, tar paper shacks and vile beginnings, but not too much—not to unceasing oppression, a sole source in readiness—for here there is no silo to grease lest rats steal our grits, nor chilblains to treat, nor blood-soaked rags to hang on a line, there is only me.