LITERARY SHOWCASE
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2019
THE HOMELESS MAN
CAROL PERRY
Wandering aimlessly down busy Race Street, I enjoy the fingers of light as they reach through the bare branches and touch the street. Looking at nothing in particular I gaze into the shop windows and overhear sound bites as people drift by. My view shifts to the street and something ahead catches my attention: it is a homeless person in a wheelchair half a block up on the other side of the street. My heart jumps as I ask deep in my unconscious, “Could it be him?”
Homeless men of a certain age, somewhere between graying adult and elderly, catch my attention. I know it is mostly impossible for any of them to be my brother, but my mind plays tricks on me. I’ll see him out of the corner of my eye: a characteristic angular, jerky walk, or hair the color of dirty dishwater, or something I can’t quite put my finger on. There are definitely times when his shadow plays upon the light of my day.
2011
WAITING FOR MY PERIOD
SAMANTHA KENNEDY
Day 1
I pee clear, not a pink drop.
Waiting to wake in the middle of the night
To find my panties stained with
A red Rorschach test
Day 2
forget to eat
then binge on salty snacks
sitting in class, waiting, waiting, waiting
replaying nights I sweated beneath him
losing keys, English papers, eyelashes, fingernails
sweating into my morning coffee
2016
GREEN INK
PATRICA BOYLE
TARA PULLED BACK THE BEDROOM CURTAIN, revealing paisley patterns of frost that glittered on the window in the weak morning light. Through the missing slat in the wooden fence she saw Mrs. Adriatico’s sheets hanging on the clothesline, stiff rectangles that brushed the frozen tips of the meager lawn. Marco must be very ill for Mrs. Adriatico to leave the laundry on the line overnight. A bell rang, and Tara shrugged on her terrycloth robe to answer the summons. In spite of the cold, a smile lit her face; the frost was beautiful, and its beauty cost her nothing. She held its delicate image in her mind while she went to see what her father wanted.
“Good morning, Dad. How’d you sleep?”