PROSE
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Desert Stars

Colton Ray

The stars above shone with an empty light. The fire had died off to embers that glowed with a sad and barely perceptible heat while the horses nearby muttered amongst themselves and dust swirled in the ghostly wind.

Rodney and Hatcher had been traveling west for what seemed like ages. Out in the wasteland of the desert with only the harsh sun for a friend, the artificiality of time had become more and more apparent until it ceased to exist. There was only the dust and the sun and the inevitable cycle between day and night.

Rodney had been slipping in and out of sleep for hours. Through bleary eyes, he thought he’d seen shapes on the horizon. Every night he laid out on the ground, the cold seeping up from the earth into his bones. He would sometimes feel as if the stars were pulling on him with some vague gravity or that the ground below him was slowly shifting and he would suddenly fall forever into the night sky. Some nights the stars felt close enough to touch, to call his own; yet other nights they seemed forbidding and mocked him with their distance.

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ARTWORK
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Old Farm Silo

Aleff Gripp

POETRY
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Requiem for My Father

Taylar Lane

I wish I could have been
at the beach that day.
Not as your daughter,
but as a stranger
standing by.
It would have looked so beautiful
from far away,
without the film of tears
clouding my eyes.

But there is life
after death.

It takes not the shape
of angels, nor does it haunt
my unlit bedroom
like a ghost,
dressed in whatever clothes
you died in.

Instead, it enters
like a lightness
and it settles
in my bones.

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