ghost or haunted

creative non-fiction

by Jen Rouse

When the paint finally gave way around the bolt, there was no time to catch the iron bed rail before it met the ridge of the back of my skull. The soft early morning light fizzed around my eyes, as I stumbled to the back of the cabin to vomit. But there was a moving truck waiting and a deadline. Dead. Lines. A layered and electric web built to capture prey between worlds. . . .

The value of a $20 bill

creative non-fiction

by Christine M. Estel

Here you go Buttercup, he'd say as he slipped one into my hand or my coat pocket. Or into my bookbag, or wherever. That's what he did when we drove anywhere together—doing it on the sly, usually in the middle of a story, so I would be unsuspecting. Of course I knew his game. . . .

2002

creative non-fiction

 by Tom McAllister

In summer, we played Wiffle Ball. A few nights a week, we met at Shawmont, a public school that had a big playground with a map of the U.S. painted onto the concrete. It was far enough away from any houses that nobody complained about the noise we made, and the fence was a perfect distance for measuring home runs. . . .

mi amigo

creative non-fiction

by Kevin Sterne

That was the summer I was trimming trees to be ornaments. Cutting away new growth and old growth, shaping honey locust and hackberry and maple away from windows and sidewalks, alleys and the neighbor’s property line. People’d call and complain about their Tree of Heaven—express their fear of it one day falling on their house and crushing their sleeping children into oblivion. I’d stand under it with my ladder and pole saw and cut away until they were happy and felt their families were safe. . . .

by Greg Oldfield

I recently walked into the locker room at my gym to one of the old dudes blow-drying his hair naked in front of the mirror. While his gray chest hair fluttered and his white cottage-cheese ass jiggled, his junk scraped across the counter top. The same counter where the rest of us wash our hands, brush our teeth, or pop the occasional pimple. I wasn’t shocked. . . .

in bed

fiction

by Wilson Koewing

“A million years before time existed, I would have loved you.” 

Jade said things like this and despite the pretension, managed to sell them. 

At night we’d lie in bed listening to Alex Jones. This was 2013. Before Jones flew completely off the rails. He was always fringe and dangerous, just unaware of his reach then. Jade found him hilarious. . . .

roll out the barrel

fiction

by Jacqueline Doyle

My little brothers and I were eating cereal in front of the TV, watching the Lawrence Welk Show. This was a long time ago. Hardly anyone remembers the soap bubbles and how he always said “Wunnerful, wunnerful” and that guy with the sequined accordion now. . . .

Watchful Convert: Charles Bukowski and the Perils of Happiness

Non-fiction

by John Timpane

Many of Charles Bukowski’s poems seem spoken by an experienced cynic, tired of the world and resolved to be truthful, even though, or maybe because, the truth hurts. Throughout the poems throbs the sense that the cynical person is punishing life for having disappointed him or her. “Inside every cynic,” George Carlin is said to have said, “is a disappointed idealist.” Bukowski’s poetry is an epic of degradation and disappointments, especially in himself, what he really is, what he has become. That radiates throughout the backstreets world of his poetry. . . .

a selection of poetry

poetry

A selection of poetry by some of SVJ’s finest poets: Anne E. Michael, George Drew, L. R. Harvey, Joyce Meyers, & Jack Chielli.