Fall 2013: History Repeats Herself.

by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

Evening, and I bend
toward the last light

with the maple trees.
It falls through each of us.

When the shadows shift
feels like a whisper, someone’s

breath, a secret in my ear.
This fall threw me.

The way one becomes two,
then three, and it goes on

until the common ground
is covered in leaves

and the past is hard to make out.
Everything was green,

then we rounded a corner
to catch it all afire.

We cling to what repeats,
ask for the night

so that we may be comforted
by the stars. If nothing else,

that unites us as a breeze
whisks shut the window of day.

The maple tree shivers.
Evening, and I bend.

by Brian Griffith. Reportedly, China’s head patriarchs have always been the central objects of their people’s devotion, at least they told us so. But who believed them? The women always had their own elders, heroes, saints and goddesses. For a time we heard that the traditions of “stupid superstitious women” had been swept aside from […]

by Charles S. Kraszewski. Illi, ut erat imperatum, circumsistunt hominem atque interficiunt; at equites Aedui ad Caesarem omnes revertuntur. The facts are recorded in the stately prose of Caesar’s Gallic War, With a clerical calmness no more dramatic than the price of Pannonian beer, The end of sessions that side of the Alps, Or the […]

by Robert Markland Smith. The universe had ceased to expand, having reached its outer limit, and had begun to contract. Just like a person from the Northern hemisphere crossing into the Southern hemisphere past the Equator, we were all headed in reverse time towards a South pole without singularities which would consist in an implosion, […]

by James Lewelling. Our apartment had no windows and only one door. I was standing by the door looking out when Fred came up behind me with his clipboard. That bothered me right off the bat. Granted, I had agreed to let him in. He worked for this company. The company was trying to figure […]

by David D. Horowitz. “You didn’t learn from your mistakes,” History repeats herself to ABC, “and now you wonder why she walked out on you. You blamed her when you lost your wallet. You yelled at her when you did not like the movie you chose to rent. You scolded her when the Thai restaurant […]

by Peter Dudnik. They were worse than terrorists; they were lazy, bankrupt, godless drug addicts. They were the American nightmare and they should have died off, but no, they couldn’t even do that! They survived better than cockroaches. Four miserable generations of pleasure-pursuing rats still clung to their sorry lives in No Libertyville, U.S.A., where […]

by Marie Davis and Margaret Hultz. Sister Rita was petite, slight by adult standards, only fourteen hands high—fourteen, seven-year-old, hands high. Each hand stapled alongside the closet door in her one-bedroom apartment; hand upon sun-faded hand, each resting on top of the other. Hands of children now long gone from Sister’s life; washed out memories […]