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Past Poetry by Zary Fekete

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Janos picks up his friend's aunt and remembers her love of Hungarian poet Petofi. Image generated with OpenAI A text message arrived one morning from my friend. His aunt was arriving from the countryside that morning for her annual physical. She was planning to stay at the apartment of her two oldest friends, two spinster sisters, but the friends were out, just then, at a cherry-picking festival. Would I be so kind to collect his aunt at the train station and usher her to the apartment until the sisters arrived home later that day? The key would be under the mat. I checked my schedule, and, finding no other occupations in my morning, I sent him back a short response asking for the arrival time of his aunt's train. I boarded the tram for the station, and, as the car slowly moved through the streets, I tried to remember what I knew of my friend's aunt. I met her when my friend and I were in high school together, when she still lived here in the city. She had liv...
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Reflection by James W. Miller

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Brandon wishes he could grow up faster, and thanks to his bedroom mirror, he does. Image generated with OpenAI The boy stood in front of his tall, slim, wall-mounted bedroom mirror, grinning like he would for a picture. The jittery adrenaline of childhood wouldn't let him linger there long. He stood on his tiptoes, tall as he might be next year, stretching towards eagerly anticipated growth. In his peacocking, he slipped and fell forward, right into the glass. Except the glass accepted him like water, and he slipped through to the other side, leaving silver ringlets circling outwards from the point of contact. He fell onto the floor of the bedroom in the mirror. Wide-eyed, he looked around at his new world, exactly like his old world, exactly what he had seen in the reflection. The mirror still shimmered behind him, casting dancing light. "Brandon! Dinner!" came his mom's voice from downstairs. But it wasn't his mom's voice, because this wasn...
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Kiss Me on a Hill by John Onah Otroyin

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A young Nigerian man cultivates a relationship with a foreign sugar daddy in the hope of making money, but fate has different plans. Image generated with OpenAI You met him in 2012 from a 'good-for-nothing' Facebook group. His first message was 'a pic of your dick.' You rolled your eyes in disgust, but played your part, asking him for some dollars. He gave excuses, and you pushed him to a corner but didn't block him. His username reads German, but he claimed to be an American; like every sucrose guardian, he is the age of your grandfather with a white, sagging face. He told you his work is with the government but withholds the details. You chat with him only when bored and wonder if you entertain him because you lack love from home. He is always ready to tell you how much he loves you and how he may die tomorrow if you stop talking to him. He calls you his husband, his African king, his Wakanda lover with skin of honey and voice of an angel. Sometimes yo...
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How It Ended by Douglas Baker

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Anders is struggling to connect with his wife and daughters, and is about to face a reckoning. Image generated with OpenAI This is how it ended. In late March, Anders took his wife and daughters to Lake Erie, on the New York side. It was supposed to be a quiet week when he and Cynthia could visit a few wineries and take Lily and Harper to dinner. He'd imagined it as a sort of reset for everyone, especially him. He'd been feeling tense, worn out by work, on edge. They needed some time away. But the trip was a failure. On the second night, at a local restaurant (a stone cottage by a lighthouse), Anders was the only one not staring at his phone. They were like zombies, all three of them. He set a timer, just to see how long it would last: seven full minutes without a word from any of them, broken only by the waiter's voice saying, "Careful, hot plate." The phones went down momentarily as they prepared to eat, and, in that brief communal moment, Anders c...
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She Was Trouble by Anastasia Petrenko

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A teenager is captivated by her daydreaming new friend, but will she open her mind or hold her back? Image generated with OpenAI I met her in secondary school - the shy girl who sat in the back, her notebook always open but rarely taking notes. For months, I ignored her existence until the day I glimpsed a poem she'd written and left on her desk. Her words unlocked chambers of my mind I didn't know existed. When I offered her friendship, she accepted with a quiet grace that belied her true nature. Soon I discovered she wasn't the wallflower I'd imagined, but a collage of personalities - outspoken, mercurial, lost in reveries, mysterious in every way. She lived half in our world and half in the realms of fantasy. On Monday, she was a Sailor Soldier, her head crowned with spherical buns, guardian of the precious Silver Crystal. By Wednesday, she'd transformed into the Queen of the Elves, speaking only in Quenya while our classmates stared. During Thurs...
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Pangea by Simon J Phillips

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Rory and Garrett decide to escape their deadbeat families by floating away down the Connecticut River. Image generated with OpenAI It starts and ends with the raft, more or less. That whole green summer before high school started, all me and Garrett talked about was building it. We daydreamed of floating down the Connecticut River, which started somewhere up in Canada and carried on past - somewhere farther than either of us could imagine. Instead of hanging around Bellows Falls we'd ride the river south to Brattleboro, meet up with Cindy and Hannah, whoever else happened to be around. Or maybe we'd cross to the banks of New Hampshire and see what they were about over there. Instead of Huck and Jim, these guys in a book Mister Calloway made us read, it'd be Rory and Garrett. I'm not much of a reader but parts of that book stuck. Those guys had set out down another river, named after the state of Mississippi, and didn't plan on coming back. Both of 'e...
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