Manchac Review is Southeastern Louisiana University's creative journal, published in print and online. Manchac Review Online is an interactive experience including fiction, poetry, drama, art, music/lyrics, and video shorts. Submissions are accepted year round.
All works are subject to peer review, with individual editors or instructors representing each genre for quality, content, originality, and creativity. Students whose written works are conditionally accepted may be required to meet with an editor to discuss necessary revisions prior to publication.
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.
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.