Alex Pickens
Snorting stardust and cracking hyperspace
Tearing up time continuums with a drag race
Running rings around Saturn and blue Neptune
Speedsters shootings stars of hydrogen fusion boosters
Slingshotting out of groovitational fields until our smiles
Stretch tight across our skulls, and smoke leaks out
Of the amplifiers and nostrils with our doobies askew
Later we’ll get loose and hang from Orion’s belt
And make wishes and flick coins into black holes
Watch them stretch while we down another moonshine —
Wake up in Laughing Sam’s Astroid with some android
A few stars misplaced, nebulae-brained, with stretched face
Space is dark and empty, but we laugh when they tell us
Because where there are supernovas there is stardust.
ALEX PICKENS graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in economics from James Madison University. His poems have been published in Tuck Magazine and Gardy Loo and his screenplay Black Friday was an honorable mention at the national 2017 Screenplay Festival. He is currently working on a novel and another screenplay and writes poetry when he is mentally unstable.
Devin Taylor
I’m walking down the street and
thinking about things and thinking about people
and wishing that people are things.
I go into a store and buy a zucchini
because it whispers to me: I’m happy.
I buy some toothpicks and also a knife.
I sit in the park and stick toothpicks in the zucchini;
it is not a Voodoo doll — but it is a zucchini.
I carve a smiley face; I smile my carving face.
I name my zucchini: Zucchini Friend.
It belches thank you, sir.
With a twinkle, I belch you’re welcome, friend.
It barks. I look into its slits. I gush;
I flush red flesh; I know green.
I can’t contain my happiness so much
I’m coughing with joy all over my zucchini.
DEVIN TAYLOR is a recent Washington College alumnus with a B.A. in English and minors in Creative Writing and Psychology. His work can be found in Gargoyle, Five 2 One, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He lives in the DC Area where plays his electric kazoo mostly alone.
C. G. Thompson
for Ethan
The cloud dreamed of being a magician, but already was,
gliding on invisible currents across a performance
of sky. Faces turned toward it, self-selected audience,
curious what filigreed cumulus had up its sleeve.
A magic wand was implied, as was sleight of hand,
dexterity spread through fluffs and folds – voila!
Illusionist, its changes proved too subtle to follow,
until they became a fait accompli, water vapor quicker
than the mind, transforming from battleship to rabbit
to seahorse, wind acting as a nimble assistant.
Cloud then disappeared, creating its own smoke,
no mirrors required, the show over before anyone knew,
entertainer skipping a curtain call, time fleeting.
C. G. THOMPSON is a winner of the North Carolina State University Poetry Contest and a three-time finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize. In 2017, two of her poems appeared in downtown Winston-Salem, NC, as part of Poetry in Plain Sight. She also was a runner-up for the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are upcoming in North Carolina Literary Review, Yalobusha Review, Prime Number Magazine, Fictive Dream, Redheaded Stepchild, and Boston Literary Magazine, among others.
