The thing to know about this beach is that it is flat, extremely flat. But you don’t start there. First, you have to burn your feet on the summer cement of the parking lot. You have to step down into the loose, dry sand. You have to pick your way between the driftwood logs and across the thicket of dead seaweed. It’s like barbed wire strung across your path. There’s no avoiding it. You just let your foot sink its stringy mass of moist crunch, like cereal

"Getting to the Airport" "Altruistic Tums" Charles J. March III is a person currently living in California. His works have appeared in or are forthcoming from Evergreen Review, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, 3:AM Magazine, BlazeVOX, Expat Press, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Maudlin House, Misery Tourism, Litro, Otoliths, etc. More can be found on LinkedIn & SoundCloud.

So here we are, fallen, but not without grace. Stretched and still stretching. Time, allowing storms to pass and then, to start again. A blink, and we are looking inwards. Another, and we are merely a way for the universe to know itself. It all seems to come down to balance. Gravity, losing to expansion, but not forever. (within (within rings) rings) Rings within rings (within (within rings) rings)

Wasps drunk with the rotting juice of crab apples. It is late October, paths slick with mud and the green-wellied. You arrived on time, all of you somehow subdued, the youngest masked, in boots and cut-offs, older, unhappily nursing a cold. The house looked chilly too: Palladian, stark, weathered yellow stone, but the cattle, dozy heifers, spread across the fields, chewed as if content with the state of the world. We ate lunch, benched and distanced, in a cold, swirling wind.

Kevin craved the binoculars, a 40th birthday gift for Father from Mother. For two weeks he fantasized about spying on the farmer who wore size14 boots and once carried a sheep under each arm through a bog. He crept through the doorway, watching them pack books into boxes. Somehow, he had to get his hands on the binoculars today. His mother’s ginger ponytail fell over her front as she turned on the stepladder, handing an encyclopaedia to Jody. “Mum, I’m bored. Why can’t I help

I am doll parts tossed in a dusty vanity drawer I like to blink at pretty things & when you scoop my doll body into your arms I weep tiny doll tears because you will find new ways to amuse yourself while my porcelain greys in my dark box—I want a lung just one so I can smell your skin cedar, coconut, catnip—can you smell my dull skin? I want legs that can move without your assistance & I want a new dress—a black dress so other boys can slip it off my doll figure in the blazin

The sheets are always soft, even with lint sliding across them. Squeezed between the large pillows are a few smaller needle-pointed ones. They are all shaped like blocks. Entering the room, I head straight to the bed. When I lay back on it I have the purest view of her wide-screen television. There are more channels than my grandmother realizes, and she usually flips between the news channels, CNN and FOX to hear the differing opinions. She keeps the volume on high, and I of

Janet wandered slowly down the street; she had an hour before she had to meet Mandy for lunch at Sushi Supreme. Her eyes roamed over the contents in the window of what seemed to be an antiques shop. She leaned back and looked up. Yes, “The Antique Boutique”. Peering more closely, she caught sight of a flash of dark red and the breath caught in her throat. Was that Venetian glass? She had to go in and see. A closer look inside confirmed her guess and she looked around the diml

grandmother’s departure voices skim her ears sooth her mind beyond lost meanings and gentle fingers press unpressured love onto her translucent skin her days of tending, baking, mending, making birthing, nursing, shrouding, binding met so many needs touched so many lives she is loved will be remembered by kith, kin and strangers who cradle her with gratitude as River Styx flows to claim her and Charon takes her in his arms as voices skim her ears beyond lost meanings she sail