The Galápagos Tortoise’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Galápagos tortoise can survive for a year without food or water.

I can hardly get through a day without tasting your words.

I siphon drops of your voice into a teaspoon

and sip on them before I go to bed.

Recently, when I wake up in the mornings I have a hard time opening my mouth.

I pry my jaws open with the letter you gave me at Christmastime

and find mold the color of a Galápagos tortoise’s shell encasing my teeth like caskets.

The only way I can get them clean again

is to rinse my mouth with your laughter

or pull your words through the phone.

I wrap “I love you” around my fingers

and floss with it to get rid of the last specks of mold wedged into my gums.

The Galápagos tortoise can live over 100 years.

One even lived to be 184,

but he belonged to a royal Polynesian family

who could probably give him all kinds of vitamins

to keep him staggering on long past his prime.

I think the reason the Galápagos tortoise can live so long

is because they live slow lives.

They barely ever travel faster than 1.6 miles per hour.

At the rate I’m chasing your sinewy shadow

I’ll probably die within the month

because doctors don’t make vitamins to prevent heartbreak yet.

You’ve been slowly chipping away at me

with a pickax the size of a clothespin

since the day I met you.

Maybe the reason the Galápagos tortoise can live so long is because

they spend more time searching for a pear cactus to munch on

than they do prying their jaws open with love letters

or chasing shadows they know they’ll never catch.

Lawrence Weller is a writer and avid hiker. If you stumble upon an anti-social bearded man in the woods, it may be him. 

Still There

          When Annalisa hung up, Marvin Vasserman felt silence fogging up his apartment. Everything in the apartment was musty; Marvin hadn’t changed things up since the 80s. The same records on the dresser, the same books collecting dust on the bookshelves, the same worn furniture. Somewhere under the bed were old essays written by his students; they were probably yellowing and flaking, but Marvin never looked through them. Some things in his apartment he never touched. 

          The first time Annalisa Ling had stepped into his apartment, she remarked that it was like a well-preserved museum piece. She had been worried about the dust sticking to her silk floral dress at the time. But that was many years ago. Now, Annalisa had perfected the art of a youthful façade well into her fifties. Makeup hung on her face like tinsel on a Christmas tree, garish and heavy. Her hair was always crimped and a shade of magenta that defied normal descriptions. Marvin could picture her as they had talked, blaring tinny Asian pop music as she drove, cell phone glued to her ear and mouth popping gum.

The Reclining Nymph: To Auguste Rodin's La Danaide (1885)

I run my hand along
The ridges of your back,
Feeling your hummingbird-thin bones,
your butterfly soft skin.
You lie upon that harsh rock
Baring the back of your smooth neck,
Unblemished as a rose petal.
Do you welcome the searching hands,
Along your bare back?
The sun shining like silk
Across your body?
Curling upon the rock,
Your body looks like a shell washed up to shore
If you were to open your eyes,

What tales would they tell?

Ophelia Leong is a wife and mother who loves to write. Her work has been published in Mothers Always Write, Allegro Poetry, and Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters. She is currently working on her first novel. Check out her blog here:ophelialeong.blogspot.com. 

My sister said the sky's reflection

Dim lights glide across the pale blue wall

sleepy sighs and

Why Is The Ocean Blue?

“The sky’s reflection,” you whispered

and I nodded like I understood 

in the morning I’d wake with your fingers tangled in my hair

and watch you breathe softly

still caught in sleep’s transient glow.

I scarcely see that red wall now,

that wall that sees different lights,

hears different sleepy sighs.

I know you meant well, but

The Ocean Isn’t Blue. It’s not.

It’s stormy and melancholy and 

sometimes

I’d like to lie beneath its waves,

watch the light dim from beneath the glassy surface,

close my eyes and pretend that when I open them:

You’ll be lying next to me

fingers tangled in my hair

and I’ll watch you breathe softly,

still caught in sleep’s transient glow.

close my eyes and pretend that when I open them:

The Ocean Is Blue.


Rose Solomond is a writer from Western Pennsylvania and there are few things she enjoys more than books, tea, strawberries, and stargazing. 

A Poem on Angry Clouds

I had never seen the sky so looming and dark,

boiling clouds that rumbled and shook.

So dark and heavy I could reach up and touch them

but would not be able to bear their weight

when they invariably came crashing down

on my spindly virgin shoulders.

I could have sworn I saw the hands of God

form in those oppressive clouds

raising his fist like a warning

of all the storms that would haunt me

if I turned my head and ignored him.

But if the clouds were the most furious clouds

my wide doe eyes had ever beheld,

they were nothing compared to the hot, rising sparks inside of me

I skated across the potholes of the parking lot

The condemning raindrops bouncing off of the rays

beaming from inside of my soaring, racing heart.

God’s tears came pouring down on me

and they felt like warm bath water.

He pelted my friend’s used car with angry fists

while our laughter and squeals spewed from the car like confetti.

His tears formed puddles along the road.

I danced through them in yellow rain boots.

He bellowed at me and pounded on my windows.

I couldn’t hear him over our incessant babble;

giggles that filled the room like balloons,

colorful and shiny and floating

until they are pricked by truth’s sharp needle

or worse, slowly deflate until they are nothing more

than wrinkled piles of plastic in sad huddles on the floor.

I was drunk on the liquor of sin.

I guzzled lust like sweet champagne

and my world was warm.

I had never been so warm.

I will never be so warm as I was on the day

that the clouds loomed like angry fathers

and God’s tears flooded the parking lot.

Madelyn Bowman is an aspiring writer and artist. She spent much of her childhood moving around the country, and learned to find solace in her writing. Maddy now lives in Massachusetts and works as a writer for a local newspaper. 

Things I wish I could tell you but already have a hundred times

I am bound to you.

You pummel me with bloody fists, wring me dry, and leave me hanging

limp and lifeless

on a clothesline in the baking sun,

all the while covering my battered body in soft kisses

and whispering sweet words in my ear.

I love you in a way that pains me

You tower like a podium to me

though you are short

You smell of frantic bodies and hot skin and friction

though you are forever kept from me by that cold, dull, metal circle

You taste like life to me

though you are dying.

You’ve gone and made me sad again.

It’s okay.

I’ve gotten pretty good at rolling up my sadness into a ball and shoving it in my closet

behind a pile of socks that have lost their mates

and clothes that haven’t fit me in years but hold too many memories for me to give away.

I shuffle my emotions in a deck

and deal them out accordingly:

The happy of spades to my mother

who worries about me,

the ambitious of clubs to my father

who is hard to please,

the carefree of diamonds to my friends

who are tired of hearing about my problems,

and the queen of hearts is saved for you

who masquerades manic, violent torture behind a veil of love.

I keep one card in my hand –

the joker, of course –

to distract me from your silent abuse

with slapstick jokes and simple humor.

People tell me I’m funny

and they’re right.

Nothing makes people laugh like learning my happiness is built on a house of cards

that trembles when the wind blows in a certain direction

and is bound to come crashing down one day

in a terrific flurry of shiny numbers and stoic faces.

Madelyn Bowman is an aspiring writer and artist. She spent much of her childhood moving around the country, and learned to find solace in her writing. Maddy now lives in Massachusetts and works as a writer for a local newspaper.