Author: Malcolm Glass
-
Alice’s Prayers
After she was cast back to Umbravia by the evil Duke Cattivo-Piede, for false entry into Leoht, Alice could never forget her first-and-always love Aldun. Since her return to her homeland, her only wish was to return to that land of silver flowers and sapphire moons. And the crystal blue eyes of Aldun. Every night…
-
Shelling
We cruised down the rattling washboard road, as Toni hugged the shaking steering wheel of her dad’s 1950 DeSoto sedan. She swore the faster we went, the less we’d feel the ruts. We parked next to sprawling bearberry shrubs and dragged our hot-soled Pro-Keds through the deep dune sand. She tossed sand high with…
-
Art Class
– for Beryl Thomas Mrs. Thomas stood before the class, colored chalk dust flecked across her navy blue blouse. She snipped the folded paper this angle, that, this curve, and straight, and opened it to a T or a B. We made an alphabet louder than we could speak or write, to frame the…
-
Reincarnation
—after Wallace Stevens I placed a tattered sonnet in a Mason jar on a low hill in Tennessee, adrift and lost, and waited for rains to wash my frail poem far eastward, tumbling to brook, to stream, river-tossed past roots and slim hulls to wave swells of the sea. By current shape and…
-
First Kiss
Senior Prom, May third, nineteen fifty-two.The lights lowered for the last dance and our shadowed first kiss, kept like a flowerunfading. Arthur’s Swing Band mellowed, to spotlight the husky crooning of Miss LouParsons, “Goodnight, sweetheart,” at the hour of wishing: “In my dreams tonight I’ll hold you,” as we’ve held each other from that midnight…
-
Her Journey
– for Charla Two brown eyes, framed by spraysof pine needles, stared, blinked. The fawn lowered her head. This is a once-in-a-life, she thought,as she lifted the camera to her eye.The camera strap rustled, and the deer bolted. Her mama quickly herded heraway. In the viewfinder the focusingdots nervously flickered trying to find those eyes.…
-
In the Junk Shop
Filed in this black box of smoky negatives, parents, children, grandparents,aunts and uncles all gussiedup for Easter, the wornporch steps and sagging,moldy gutters behind them. And the toothy birthday girl, the erstwhile boyfriends in bow ties, the fresh shine of a large-mouthed bass, Christmas smiles set glowing by bubble lights. And I am the one…