“Better Latte Than Late” by Rekha Valliappan They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon. –Edward Lear Rila works from home at Author, Self-Published. She was a motorbike rider once, in the days when Harley-Davidsons looked a whole lot different than they look today. But she wants to grow a jardin potager—a French urban herbal garden, and sip dynamite charcoal latte the livelong day. So she can write books. Motorbikes is where she derives her courage from—to face life on concrete terms like a man. Where she comes from girls, cradle to grave, do not even ride bicycles, although some books written a hundred years ago suggest women bicycled their…

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Tryst mid-afternoonthe hotel corridor is quietoutside our room where feeble lightdulls bleached sheets later on when the sky is dueto erupt and hasten darknesswrapped in a fog shroudI have a fifty-mile drive home but right now I am malleablebeneath your calloused palms I am a well-fed bird eager to settlewithin the coarse and tenderthe flesh-and-bonenest of you Unincorporated Places at night you drive, alert for deer and drunkswhile I gaze west, my retinas gather the glowof stray porch lights and second-story windows  from communities tucked into collarbone hollowsalong the interstate, which reeks of a paper mill some of their names I mispronounce, but you nevercorrect the strange syllables in my mouth Tenuous is the Thread chaos barely constrained by butterfly wings that make figure eights yet tectonic plates gnash their teeth and continents break  could be a low-flying planeor seismic…

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Easter Vigil I had imagined it otherwise.Not as we are, on the white sandpossibly surrounded by peacocks and peahens.I meant the other thingwhich I no longer remember. The year Igor Markevitch diedthe batons of conductorsturned to asps and slithered offuntil spiked to death by the cellists.A pistol cracked in B-flat.Aldo Moro was no more. The cognoscenti raisedtheir little coffee cups;thei rsaucers whiteunfractionable hosts.Pop the trunk: Morois not there, for he has risen.The brigades reddenand limp off, firing Kalashnikovs into hollow desert. Asice locked Lake Como’s secretsdeep within, no one sawMarkevitch descend to Hadesin the form of a bee, orMoro,saints, and Caesarswho swatted him away.The peahen’s voiceis a cry for helpbut Lazarus cannot help her,waiting as he must for his second death,knowing full well what to expect.Romano Prodi staggers from the gravesmiling fatly. He smells of eucalyptus.Like bits of…

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Deception Pass   In the daggered dreams of moonlight, in what cannot wait till morning.   A driver on the bridge’s back, on the way to the worksite’s weary yawn   leaves his car and leaps like hope into water’s frozen hands.   On the spine of Deception Pass, courage leaves prints on the bones   and mercy is late for work.   *** Daniel lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have been in Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, Western Humanities Review, and others. His poems are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Duende Literary Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Magnolia Review, Isthmus Review, The McKinley Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, Columbia College Literary Review, January Review, Under a Warm Green Linden and Yemassee. His books, “This New Breed: Bad Boys and Gentleman” an…

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Editor’s Note: A pivotal World War II battle was fought on the beaches of France in the summer of 1944. The Normandy invasions by the Allied Forces resoundingly defeated the Germans, who occupied France, but the cost in lives was immense: over 425,000 lives were lost. Yet for the survivors, many more lives were “lost,” as Cindy Layton’s story recounts. Storming Normandy From the doorway I watched as Dad held the gun in his palm, inspecting it, not like they were old friends but business partners. It looked old but still deadly. Where did he get that? His bony fingers ran alongside the round barrel while his eyes traveled along the length of its metal frame. The door to the safe was open, exposing envelopes and a metal box. A purple velvet bag, showing the…

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  Bent   I can bend and break, mend and make amends, start riots and cry out— in surrender of once feeling stifled.   I can close my eyes and still see what is gained, lost, and corrupted;   for what is done does not die. It festers and flourishes— seeps into the hollows of every passing moment;   for pain itself is simply a shelter that serves to protect the past from the threat of being forgotten.   And yet how can I ever want to straighten my back   when I am stronger through this weight I carry?     Finite   You were not the orange hue from the streetlamp. You were the streetlamp as we lay upon my parents’ driveway on nights that were heavy with humidity and our quick, quick…

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Photo Credit: Tori Merkle Photography We met Daniel in Harvard Square, where he stood at the corner of Mass Ave and Brattle, typewriter poised to write a poem for a dollar. We asked him to write a poem for our dog, and what he pounded out on the old manual keyboard was sublime. We asked for more, and a correspondence ensued – Boston, New Orleans, Florida – and produced the following excerpts from his impressive body of work. Here’s how he describes his writing: As for the story of how I came to write poetry in Harvard Square: it has everything to do with my love affair with New Orleans, which started three years ago when I hitchhiked from New York to the Big Easy. New Orleans is a place where there’s an established legacy…

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