When someone wears white after Labor Day in Wichita

By Amy Barnes

a tornado flattens all the corners of the Casual Corner I manage after we help dress the local news anchor in a news anchor flat accent suit, flat white like a Starbucks drink, flat against her chest because she isn’t a weather girl, flat because my assistant manager who I didn’t know was stealing the store bit by bit in her wood-paneled station wagon helped to steam the off-white suit on the flat woman with flat jewelry for television and a paper doll flat shirt for underneath the suit, all the while the weather girl should have paid more attention to the weather and not her skin-tight, not-flat outfit which meant no one knew the tornado was coming until there were flattened mannequins left in the flattened mall and only a stack of weather girl sweaters on weather girl mannequins in the assistant manager's trunk, all jumbled and bumpy and busty.

Amy Cipolla Barnes lives in the South with dogs and kids and words and at @amygcb on Twitter.

Art by K Worthington.

Fly Away

By William Woolfitt

In Oklahoma, Albert Brumley was picking bolls in the cotton patch, singing to himself while he picked, rearranging parts of "The Prisoner’s Song," changing it around, squinting when he sneaked a look at the mean red sun, too bright and hot for mid-morning, his face sweaty, his overalls damp, his body damp, his hands sore, could he have another life, could dreams take him there, could blue clouds, could a whirlwind, his father a sharecropper, neighbors bringing him down to size, neighbors saying try your hand at coal, get you a job in the strip pits at Rock Island, but he was listening to the notes in his head, to the new sounds, to the ragged wind, he straightened up and called out, when the shadows grow, a bit of new song, unformed and crude.

William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020).

Photo by Julie Dixon.

I Am Healing My First Tattoo

By Mim Murrells

Tired of my worrying, my younger brother showed me a photo of an actual infected tattoo so

I would know what that kind of thing actually looks like, and I couldn’t tell if it was a

kindness or a cruelty; stagnant, the summer makes sharks out of flies.

Mim Murrells is currently eighteen years old and a Creative Writing student at UEA in Norwich, England.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.