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  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • 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
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
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Glassworks

Written in November’s Heart by Kathleen McGookey

11/1/2022

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Sunlight like yellow silk filters through the maple’s bare branches. Our summer fawns have turned tawny and wary, gathered at the far edge of the ash-colored field. The light is so fragile now. Remember the gold-throated lily? When these black trees hid inside July and swayed with their whole bodies? We ran out of time. After school, black walnuts fall onto leaves shaped like feathers, hands, tears. One blade of grass bends under the weight of a spider, as it climbs to the tip. My heart feels like that.
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Kathleen McGookey has published four books of prose poems and three chapbooks, most recently Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, and Sweet. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
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Resting at Your Grave, I Remember When You Said, “I Love You, Wittmeyer” by Cathy Wittmeyer

8/1/2022

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Rain pricked my face through the screen door & I knew it dripped down the back of your T-shirt. A neighborhood dog crooned. Still, I pushed you into that dark wet after our ritual hug against the peeling doorframe & then those words next to my last name. I pushed you out, turned on the outside light, & said go home instead of I love you, too. It wouldn’t be right to believe a whiskeyed tongue. The beagle kept howling—the heckler. To take your keys & put you up on my sofa for a night didn’t seem safe after those words—afraid to throw friendship at fire. I pushed you out on slick stones in shiny grass. My family name was a prayer on your raspberry-stem lips. I felt whole when you said it. I never told you that. You were the first I told I was engaged. You came to our wedding. Years later, I still hadn’t told you when you died in a car wreck on a different rainy night. Had someone else pushed you out in the slippery dark? Did a hound howl a warning before you said you loved her, [last name]?


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Cathy Wittmeyer is a poet from Buffalo, NY. She works in Dornbirn, Austria. Her poem “Possession” received an honorable mention in the 2018 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry from Carlow University in 2020. Her chapbook, knotted, was a finalist for the 2020 Broken River Prize. Her work has appeared in The Tiny Journal, Tangled Locks Journal, and Book of Matches among others. See more at: https://cathywittmeyer.com
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My Mother's Farmland: Thirteen Acres Square by Emily J. MacIntyre

7/1/2022

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The land was grass in all directions     grass and mesquite trees     grass that hid Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes. One summer we gathered them     all     in a triumphant bundle of blue and white, red and orange. Our faces streaked with     red Texas clay    we proudly presented the fruits of our harvest to our mother.

She cried. She cried over the blooms through a smile. She smiled because we loved her, she cried because    we broke the cycle of flower from seed to root     and they would never grow again. Her laugh lines crinkled with sorrow as she gave us instructions on drying and extracting their ink. 

Thirteen magical acres of     space         imprisoned the small house inside miles of waving grass. Wispy salt-and-pepper hair pulled under a scarf, she dug her paint-stained fingers into red soil and coaxed her dream garden into life, a half-acre wide with melons, strawberries, zucchini, corn. 

In her     mind’s eye     the artist sketched out her farm: chickens, horses and goats. 

Her best friend died    in the middle of the night     we picked up the pretty girl I had grown up with, played with, fought with. I was sad my friend had lost her mom    I didn’t see     my mother’s best friend had left the earth. Her confident, the woman she walked with, shared trauma, everyday-ness        gone. 

She had watched her friend     glow translucent     as cancer ate her brain. She disappeared into the tall grass where my mother could not follow. We never knew - a mother hides her pain. 

Her fingers bled charcoal, brightly colored chalk, and     silence      as she watched her children grow. 

Then came the day cancer took my mother by the hand and led her where I could not follow. My confidante walked into the tall grass until         she vanished         obscured by the thorns of the mesquite. Her beauty swallowed by the land that had long ago staked a claim on her soul. 
It swallowed us all, grassy farmland dotted with mesquite trees and tears    a broken cycle        hearts pulled out by the root unable to go to seed.
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Emily MacIntyre is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Mississippi University for Women, focusing on poetry, non-fiction and playwriting. She holds a BA in Theatre from California Lutheran University. Emily works as free-lance stage manager in Denver Colorado and is a Guest Artist for the Stagecraft department at Denver School of the Arts. Her passion projects are realizing story to stage as a poet/spoken word artist and creating hybrid work across genres.
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Concerto #4 in Dm by Robert Beveridge

4/1/2022

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​People mill around, wait for the start of the show.

Two guys stand in the row above me, discuss gazpacho in near-orgasmic terms. One has an upside-down cross hung from the ring in his nose, his jacket a paean to Satan, his demeanor the easy comfort of one who rules many with benign power.

His friend is a small, mousy sort, with horn-rimmed glasses. A smattering of acne peppers his face. He will grow up, go to college, get a job, forget this concert. The shirt he wears will be thrown away or given to the Salvation Army.

Outside, the concession stand has run out of hot dogs. A man bites into his own hand, chews. A jet of blood stains his mustache. He smiles, picks up the mustard.

A bevy of plastic sirens roves over the arena, call would-be sailors in tuneless voices. The pair of glasses behind me roves over blackclad breasts as a trio of them walk down the stairs, through the arch to the concessions.

The mustachioed gourmet regurgitates maggots from his dead flesh—no, just sauerkraut. Perhaps he should have used ketchup instead. He goes back to his seat.

Some in the first row begin to wonder if the band has yet entered the arena.

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Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Medium Chill, Qutub Minar Review, and Remington Review, among others.
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Sometimes Trauma Comes Back for More by Lannie Stabile

2/1/2022

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I wish the machete stayed buried in the monster. I wish the monster stayed buried in the lake. I wish I could rewind the movie and let the girl recover: her prom night, her friends, her clothes, her bucketful of optimism in those first fifteen minutes. Sometimes, after the credits, a hand ejects from the grave and latches on. The girl kicks and kicks and kicks. The audience may argue it’s a dream sequence. It isn’t. She will use therapy and capsules and razors to remove the unsightly feature, but the insistent fingers remain. She will learn to wear wide leg pants to hide her new anklet. Her friends will call it a statement. In the winter, she will tuck the dead appendage into the plush mouth of an Ugg boot. With its rampant short shorts and flip flops, she will resent summer. She will try frolicking on the beach with her dead, purple pet flailing, and the boys will laugh and laugh and laugh. Sometimes the hand seizes the happy ending, and the girl struggles until the screen goes black.

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Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. In 2022, look out for her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything (ELJ Editions). Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile or @NotALitMag, where she throws random writing contests and open mics.
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    FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS


    Categories

    All
    Alice McCormick
    Arandus Larson
    Cathy Wittmeyer
    Concerto #4 In Dm
    Emily McIntyre
    Flash Fiction
    Jeanette Smith
    Kathleen McGookey
    Lannie Stabile
    Letter Of Acceptance
    Lilly Roan
    Micro Essay
    My Mother's Farmland: Thirteen Acres Square
    Prose Poetry
    Prose-poetry
    Resting At Your Grave
    Robert Beveridge
    Small-words
    Snail
    Sometimes Trauma Comes Back For More
    The Buses
    The Cage You Started From
    The Wave
    Where The Sun Goes
    Written In November's Heart
    Zain Syed
    Zorina Exie Frey

    COVER IMAGE:
    ​"Morning Light" 
    Louis Dennis
    ​ISSUE 23

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