 Flying Machines (double sided artwork), by Charles A.A. Dellschau (USA) c. 1920 War Then suddenly, from the clouds beyond the street lights and broken city full of maybes and broad cuts in the asphalt, hate plowed into the cul-de-sac of our world. It was after the full moon rose behind the storm clouds and after those clouds turned the night to liquid, when October turned fire-weather--lightning or bombs, it was hard to tell which--burst from sky and left a momentary sketch on the retinas of our surprise. Evolving from an imagined backstory, I see pieces of the war machine sweeping away everything: a circus wheel, a gear, a wing, a broken window, a table tennis game, a book, a stolen poet, a fractured child. And I wonder how much more must break, how much more must we watch fall apart. Julene Waffle Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher in rural NYS, an entrepreneur, a nature lover, a wife, a mother of three boys, two dogs, three cats, a bearded dragon, and, of course, she’s a writer. She finds pleasure in juggling these jobs while seeming like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal Blog, NCTE’s English Journal, Mslexia, The Bangalore Review, The Ekphrastic Review, among others. Her work also appears in several anthologies, and her chapbook So I Will Remember. Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com. ** Flying Machines Were those dreams with you behind the counter through all your long years in retail purgatory? Or did they wait like seeds in the desert for the rains to come quickening at last to rise unfurling leaves like wings into the welcome air? Was the freedom you found in that small attic space what saints found in their bare cloisters prophets and philosophers in their barren caves? Freedom to unleash fantastic dreams rising higher than the eagles riding the updrafts like lethal angels full of grace free from earth with all the snags and stops that kept your wings clipped while you bought and sold each day's account one more stone to keep you grounded until you retired finding room enough in a narrow attic to unpack your dreams making endless images of flying machines drawn in ink and watercolour wash with such assurance even the most fanciful painted like a gypsy caravan looks ready to lift off the page and fly Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, Inscribe, and Verse Virtual. Her collection How to Become Invisible is now available from Kelsay books. ** Casting No Shadows like fresh smoke stealing out the long-necked chimney far above the crematory walls, we drift atop the river of shimmer past space and time. We shift with rain that sent the earth wafting up the window by your very own bed. They are watering the plants you had said, then taking it all in your last breath. Splashes leap, spreads below a green solace mobbed by leathery brown peeling bark, almost pleasing. We meet and part like light and cloud swaying in the wind. We are lost to an empty dream. Abha Das Sarma An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru. ** I Think I Am Flying I think I am flying! My mind...double-sided art. Inhabited by thoughts, ideas, and dreams impossible to fake. Now, I am ending up looking with my closed eyes into my burning heart. An intricate mechanism of singularities. They are always there. When I wake up, when I sleep, when I stay, when I weep. When I feel...Sometimes I feel an immense precipice in myself, my throbbing aorta wanting to leave my still body, to live the life I am living inside, stubbornly, together with the festering riot of my sinews, my veins, and my skin. My wholeness aches in a metaphysical pain beyond myself. Deep innuendoes are crawling into my aching self. The one who wants to evade my life’s circularity, travelling in my space of flying wheels. There is nothing like it. It is my cabinet of curiosities. When it is too much, it is the only place that contains me, being like a mirror to my intimation, where things are smooth. But, until today, I couldn’t find the key. It is the first time in ages that I can enter. The key was there the whole time. In the same spot. Thus, I couldn’t see it because it was me who was not there. My flying wheels—my happy place, a realm of my experimental joy. Oppressive, the barometric pressure, disguised in excitement, invites my normality-shaped loneliness to wait for me. Eventually, I am stepping into the imponderability of the room, into my freedom, caged in a thought. In my room of flying wonders, my eyes become spinning wheels, guilty of making me suspiciously alive, as my ears contribute to the noise of my silence, ill-heard by my mind. Worn, I kiss my morning with hope, and the wheels give me a timeless merriment. I think I am flying! In daring volutes of foreign loops. I am there... flying in my secret departure, unaware of my destination but inconceivably happy. I am playing, swinging, in this whirlpool of flying machines that are carrying out a radious siege of circles, twists, and upside-down dreams. Suddenly, the stern doctor opens the door brutally, with an inexplicable sense of entitlement. I am indulging myself in the pleasure of righteous indignation. Then, falling is my only choice. Falling into the same bed where gravity has been dragging me into a painful reality. The reality… etching deeper into my ultimate verse of pain. Since the accident, the bed has been my pre-elegiac station, where I haven’t got other alternatives but flying with my mind, committing a majestic censorship of my thoughts, parched well, linked to my numb body, which forgot to wander. ‘’How are we today?’’ I cried so many times, with no voice. I screamed, buried in my weeping moan, repeating all over again in my head. I think I am flying! Laura (Grá) Adumitroaie Laura (Grá) Adumitroaie is an Irish-Romanian children’s book author, poetess, Monessori teacher, writer, therapist, blogger, and linguist with a PhD in Semiotics, living in Blessingtom, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. She published a book called Poems of Absolution to honour the presence of her daughter in her life. She is a member of a few writing groups in Dublin and Blessington. She loves art in any form, being very fond of Klimt, Andy Warhol, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. Laura is currently involved in a few writing projects regarding raising awareness for children’s mental health, as well as creative and therapeutic writing workshops. Her life is dedicated to children, art and dreams. To learn more about her, visit www.ajourneyto.net. ** Thank you Note to Charles Only an outsider artist can design an outsider other the flying machine able to reach the heavens of my dreamscape. Undefeated by failure, undaunted by ridicule and mockery--we lift, soar, and drift, fueled by imagined possibilities, and the silver lining of clouds -- to hover above an imaginary Spring in a Winter's dream. Karen "Fitz" FitzGerald Karen "Fitz" FitzGerald, genre fluid, continues along the path of emerging writer, ever grateful for opportunities to submit her work, and especially to affordable venues. ** I Have Questions Mr. Dellschau, You passed away 100 years ago, your work sat ignored for another 50, discovered by happenstance in a gutter after a fire in your house. I have questions. And I’ve enlisted the assistance of psychic J’air Boudare who has communicated with Da Vinci, Klint, and Bosch, and is herself the daughter of a pilot and flight attendant. For transparency, I’m afraid of flying myself though it’s more claustrophobia than anything; we don’t need to get into that here. J’air has agreed to conduct the interview and suggested I submit questions in advance for your consideration. I have a blog and a podcast called: I Have Questions. But we don’t need to go into what blogs and podcasts are. For all I know you may be familiar with them being the visionary you were, in addition to having been a butcher and early avid cyclist who worked in an attic, ahead of your time, fanciful in your imaginations, meticulous in your water colours, and incredibly original with your collages, which in my view are metaphors for life— pieces of art pasted, patched, and intricately woven together in original ways, like us; maybe the most organic of all expressions. > J’air, are you getting all this? Too much backstory? Am I excessively side-barring? I’m assuming Mr. Dellschau has nothing but time, but who knows. Okay, I’ll paint the picture for our interview. We’re in your attic studio, both of us under 5’ 5”, so we don’t need to duck under a slanted roof, there’s a glass dome and lots of light. Birds fly above, beside, and under us. Your pipe is unlit. On your bench sits a stack of sketchpads, butcher paper, and tea with strudel that stepdaughter Elizabeth brought on a tray. Well sir, I’m drawn to your art and drawn by your story. It must’ve surprised you when your work appeared in shows with DaVinci, exhibited in New York and abroad. Critics call you an original visionary artist. But I’d like to start at the beginning, or at least early on, a broad cut view of who you were, starting with your life as a butcher. I have questions. 1). How did you get your start as a butcher and what was your favourite tool? One knife in particular? Favourite cut of meat? And this may sound strange, but I wonder since you used a lot of red in your work, and Hemingway had an artist friend named John Fulton who rose though the bullfighting ranks in Spain, rare for a non-Spaniard, and who used blood from bulls he killed in his paintings, did you ever use blood from butchered meat in your own watercolours? > J’air. Is that too weird to ask?? Too creepy? Okay maybe so. Let me ask you this— when times were slow behind the counter did you ever paint on butcher paper and dream that someday you’d devote yourself to flying machines? 2). You belonged to a secret club of aeronauts in the Sonora desert. One member invented an anti-gravity gas for lift off and propulsion. Yet research was never able to confirm the existence of the Sonora Aero Club or any of its members. Did it exist? Why the secrecy? There were theories of possible alien encounters. Care to comment? 3). I understand you were a draftsman and not a pilot or builder. Did your own long and difficult overland and over-sea travels inspire your flying machine designs? 4). In your lifetime you never showed your work to anyone. Why did you keep your beautiful art secret? Does it bother you that you’ve became famous, your work widely seen in traveling exhibits, that you’ve inspired artists and writers alike to be visionary? That they’ve attached that name to your work and placed you in a genre, posted your art on Youtube and that today, right now in fact your work is being pondered, admired, written, and talked about? And if so, will you forgive me? > J’air I’m getting into the weeds here. Too many questions? Too much off topic and personal? Some label Dellschau’s art, stories, and journals pure fantasy. But does that even matter, or in any way limit the truth of his visions? That label just seems so beside the point. Okay. Let’s keep going. 5). You ended up in Texas, maybe California, too. Did you ever miss Prussia? Perhaps dream of flying back to where you were born, landing in a pasture, and giving others a thrill that exceeded their wildest dreams? 6). Did your Flying Machine exceed your own wildest dreams? Was it in fact a dream? A continuous one? Do you despise me for asking? 7). A late bloomer at 69, do you have any advice to others who wish to pursue their art after putting it off for most of their lives? 8). Your name was misspelled on your headstone. They also left off one of your two middle initials. So disrespectful. Would you like me to correct that? I could start a Go Fund me drive. Create an App. > J’air, would he know what an App is? I just don’t know if he is in some sort of all-knowing place or what, you know. I’m in the dark here. Obviously. Okay. 9). Finally, Mr. Dellschau I love your art, admire how you didn’t feel the need to show it, monetize it, or create a brand. So pure. You even used codes in your work. Would you prefer that I keep this interview in my sketchpad? (I use them, too, though I noticed you used grids. I prefer unlined myself!). If this is your preference, please tell J’air, or show me a sign. I respect your privacy, even 100 years later. Especially so. Yes, I have questions. I also understand some mysteries are best left intact. > J’air, did you get all that? Hey J’air, are you still with me here? Guy Biederman Guy Biederman is a card-carrying genius with a fake ID. He’s a short story midwife, pareidolia doula, and a Tuxedo cat valet who writes between naps, lives on a houseboat, and walks the planks daily. It’s all true, especially the fiction. Except for the part about not liking to fly. ** NB Super Star But what of fiction, what of fact, incredible men, Wright or not, Da Vinci codes that whirl about, and Swift Laputa, flying high, for Texas, San Antonio? From magic carpets to balloons, dirigibles, for him in draught, flights of fancy, Sonora Club, his Aero bubbles, Gas NB, noted fuel, gravity free. In ornamental borders style, those watercolours, likened jewels, imagination in full flight - these circus banners, advert clowns, domain of Fool who wears the crown. Though Dellschau - name means Super Star - his works were serendipity, their preservation also chance. A grave mistake, his spell ignored, but mood flew on, think Pythonesque. Stephen Kingsnorth Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales, UK, from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces curated by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com ** 1911 and Then Some… Before he became ‘my father’ he was an astronaut. No, not to the moon, just into the sky on dodgy wings. He tested the new contraptions. Most test pilots died. He told me that he ‘listened to the engine’… and knew. They had this communion. Later he became an engineer. But before he could settle on solid earth, he took this brand-new toy to join a far-away war and promptly crashed into a Bulgarian spinach field; the local black smith and the local apothecary got him back on his… no, not feet, allowed him to continue his way to Turkey. Through the Balkans, not above and over. There were upwinds and downwinds bouncing his flimsy flying machine between the unforgiving mountains. Looked like Snoopy as pilot. God only knows who took the photo. Showing off, he crashed into a river near Istanbul. At the time it was still known as Constantinople. He and his passenger, a Turkish officer, spent the rest of their war in a hospital overlooking the Bosphorus-- eyes travelling all the way to Asia. He didn’t want to fight, just fly. Didn’t do either. Rose Mary Boehm Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a Pushcart and once for Best of Net. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. A new collection, Life Stuff, has been published by Kelsay Books. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ ** Wonder Yes, it will also be comfortable. The two of us standing, talking as the slow wheels turn in a multitude of colours, like the intricate workings of the brain, a most extraordinary invention. I can see quite clearly the beauty of the universe. It’s jewelled borders, it’s names and numbers, and how we can float above it yet also fit within it exactly, It is rather like a dream or a fancy but exciting. Would you like to join me? Louise Warren Louise Warren’s first collection A Child’s Last Picture of the Zoo won the Cinnamon Press debut poetry competition and was published in 2012. A pamphlet In the scullery with John Keats also published by Cinnamon came out in 2016. Her poems have been widely published in magazines including Ambit, The Butchers Dog, Stand, Poetry Wales and Rialto. In 2018 she won first prize in the Prole Laureate Poetry Competition with her poem The Marshes which appears in the pamphlet John Dust illustrated by the artist John Duffin and published in 2019 by V.Press. Her latest poetry pamphlet is Sometime, in a Churchyard, a collaboration with the artist Charlotte Harker published in 2023 by Paekakariki Press. ** Flying Machines That Also Teach Greek Step right up! Step right up to the incredible Ekphrastic Express! Where to, sir or madam? (idioekphrasis) Standard features of our Vogel 457 Series include patented anti-gravity technology, separate cabins for first and economy class, semi-private viewing windows, and a central dining and dancing area for your aviation pleasure. (panekphrasis) Complimentary in-flight phonographs play favorites from Blues, Broadway and Jazz. (phonoekphrasis) We’ve got experiences for every budget—anybody can travel from any place with new VR/AR Escapes. (neoekphrasis) Fancy a seat on our Time Travel Line, with routes direct to King Tut? (metaekphrasis) Let me call your attention to the Broad Cutt’s fully rotating propeller, offering luxurious maneuverability. (oligoekphrasis) This balanced four-cylinder design ensures every voyage is supersonicserene. (morphekphrasis) All Aeros fleet models were designed by visionary draftsman Charles A.A. Dellschau. (proekphrasis) Consider a visit to Alamo City heritage centres, which house his earliest works. (topoekphrasis) Judi Mae “JM” Huck Judi Mae “JM” Huck is an arts administrator currently based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is the Clark County Poet Laureate coordinator and a teaching artist for both literary and visual arts. Follow her on Instagram @bandittrl. ** It Seems Like Only Yesterday a pantoum It seems like only yesterday . . . The first time I flew in a plane. High over San Francisco Bay; It seemed I’d entered God’s domain. The first time I flew in a plane I soared into bright heaven’s skies. I felt I’d entered God’s domain, To see the world through angels’ eyes. I soared into bright heaven’s skies, The world below looked, oh-so small. To see the world through angel’s eyes From where I soared above it all. The world below looked, oh-so small-- And even the suburban sprawl From where I soared above it all Was beautiful, as I recall. And even the suburban sprawl High over San Francisco Bay Was beautiful, as I recall. It seems like only yesterday . . . James A. Tweedie James A. Tweedie has lived in California, Utah, Scotland, Australia, Hawaii, and presently in Long Beach, Washington. He has published six novels, four collections of poetry, and one collection of short stories with Dunecrest Press. His award-winning poetry has appeared both nationally and internationally in both online and print media. Among his awards for poetry are First Place honours in the Society of Classical Poets 2021 International Poetry Competition; Quarterly Prize Best Poem from The Lyric; First Place in the 2022 100 Days of Dante Poetry Competition; and the Laureate Choice Award in the 2021 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. ** she was given many names Waste of space. Never be worth a damn. Daydreamer, mind-wanderer, head full of fluff. Hearer of ugly words that floated past. Never-let-them-sticker. Receiver of whallops that landed across the back of the neck, kicks on the behind. Bone-song singer, cut mender, jaw clencher, skull healer. Lifting-chin-out-of-the-dirt expert. Girl getting on with it. Nose stuck in a book. Imagineer. Scryer, diviner. Second-sight seer, third-eye wrangler, fourth-generation witch. Never focussed on the here-and-now. Needlesmith. Stitch saver. Fabric salvager. Green magic user. Branch bender. Willow weaver. Tent pitcher of a space-bound teepee. Binder of the incantations of control. Wielder of the hazel bough. Maker of cunning devices. Hidden message revealer. Shaper of ends. Whisperer of words of power. Flame trainer. Keen-eyed watcher of the birds, gleaner of the secrets of thermal hover, the lifting thrust of a wing. Balloon inflator. Gravity tamer. Close companion of the moon, a confidant privy to its moods and passions, its orbital vagaries, its beautiful sulks and pouts, its winsome tidal tiffs. Shaman of rockets, blesser of intricate mechanisms. Cloud mapper. Craft steerer, obstacle navigator. Celestial pilot. Conjurer of alchemical energy. Miracle worker. Escape artist. Freedom taster. Emily Tee Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. She's had pieces published in The Ekphrastic Review challenges, Visual Verse, Blue Heron Review, Scavengers Lit and elsewhere online, and in print with Poetry Scotland and Sunday Mornings at the River's Poetry Diary 2024. She lives in the UK. ** A Well Grounded Gentleman The ginger dessert undulates below like the orange zest on last night’s Old Fashioneds. My head swims from too much bourbon and the machine’s buzzing reverberates painfully. The engine rumbles and roars and we continue to ascend. When Marie and I were first courting, we enjoyed a hot-air balloon ride and the delight of feeling weightless in the wind, but rocket ships are not my thing. As my ears pop, I contemplate why I ever acquiesced to this flight. I stand encased in metal—rivets and bolts sealing out the natural air and thick glass windows reminding me of my aerial captivity. Charles should never have insisted we drink so much, if he intended to fly this high. Now I wonder whether I can endure the whole journey without evacuating last night’s indulgences. Charles thinks he’s sharing a privilege. That I, his former business partner, should consider myself fortunate to be joining one of his maiden voyages. And yet, I can’t help considering the cost. He’s spent the better part of a decade on this project and sacrificed dozens of relationships in service of this machine. Maybe I’m too simple a man, but I see no need to fly higher than the clouds. What more is there to see? Give me terra firma every day. Give me horses and cars that streak across the land, and fine-boned beauties who lay across the grass. True splendor is in surface contact, not in levitation. We used to build buildings. Now Charles insists upon escaping our foundations. But what if these bolts don’t hold? What if we simply explode as the pressure overwhelms? Maybe that’s his plan. Maybe he has no desire to return to Earth. I suspect he’s never gotten over my rejection. My lack of interest in any partnership beyond business. Still, I have done nothing to make him feel small. If anything, I’ve gone out of my way to pretend he never crossed a line. Why else would I be here? And yet, I must return. I must insist he bring me back down. To my beloved Marie and to my girls. To my horses and to my gardens. To my Eden, that awaits below. I’m sorry he doesn’t have love on the ground, but he’s no more likely to find it in the sky. And every man who has ever flown ends up buried in the soil. Coleman Bigelow Coleman Bigelow is a Pushcart Prize and Best MicroFiction nominated author whose work has appeared recently in Bending Genres, Emerge Journal, Hyacinth Review and The Dribble Drabble Review. His first chapbook In Rare Cases and Other Unfortunate Circumstances was published in May. Find more at: www.colemanbigelow.com or follow him on Twitter: @ColemanBigelow and Instagram: @cbigswrites. ** Flying Machines For early aviators of the sky, Log-cabin-like designs are comic, as You cannot fly a circus wagon high: Its comfort tantalizes, but it has No force to lift it up and make the earth Grow distant. They would say the pictures are Miraculous as art, but have no worth As blueprints for a means to travel far ... Charles Dellschau would dissent. He would have said His quaint designs weren't meant for flights that go In space, but flights of fancy, which can head North, east, south, west, straight up or down below Earth's oceans—they can take you anywhere, So long as you imagine it is there! Mike Mesterton-Gibbons Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO., the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly.
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