The Bookends Review

The wind is in the dry leaves all day
It must be someone’s disappearing life.

I heard we can be seen up there,
Minutes after death,

The flickering light of what we will become
Tied to the ghosts of past and passing,

So much like those blue mirages
We find knotted to the sea.

– Seth Jani… ...continue reading

Julia Tagliere is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Writer and Hay & Forage Grower magazines and online at Buzzle; in various anthologies, including Here in the Middle: Stories of Love, Loss, and Connection from the Ones Sandwiched in between, Candlesticks and Daggers—An Anthology of Mixed Genre Mysteries, and in the juried photography and prose collection Love + Lust. Her short story, “Te Absolvo,” was named Best Short Story in the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition. Julia currently resides in Maryland with her family, where she recently completed her M.A. in Fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Look for more of Julia’s work in the forthcoming anthology The Way to My Heart—An Anthology of Food-Related Romance, Issue 61 (August 2017) of Potomac Review, or at her blog/website.… ...continue reading

When Lacie was three, she swallowed her mother’s mood ring. In spite of ipecac syrup, copious quantities of laxatives, and even a hospital visit, the ring never reappeared. Eighteen now, Lacie imagined it illuminating her belly with the changing colors of her moods, or perhaps, even, controlling them.

The surprise of the chicks, scratching now at the fresh, fragrant mulch, made her feel yellow, worked where nothing else had that week—not the azure waves lapping at her feet, not the briny breeze, not the posh beachfront resort, the skin-clearing sun, or even her first (legal) passion fruit daiquiri. No, until Lacie, walking well ahead of the others, stumbled upon the clutch of tiny black and lemon-yellow chicks cheeping and chirping and scrabbling after their coal-black mama, ring around the rosie through the resort’s pristine flower beds, the mood ring somewhere in her belly glowed a constant, peevish vermilion, one shade shy of Veruca Salt red.… ...continue reading

You stay in bed for sixteen hours. When you wake up it is night, and you notice a strange sensation in your upper lip. Prickle prickle push. You examine the skin of your upper lip in a mirror and discover the bristle-like beginnings of three white hairs on each side of your philtrum. The hairs are unusually stiff and sleek. You continue over the next few days to watch the hairs grow progressively longer at night, then recede entirely in the daytime, and to notice other changes. Your incisors become pointy. The pupils in your eyes change shape. By the 5th day your bones are dislocating themselves, popping out of sockets from shrinking suddenly, head hair receding into your scalp and everywhere else hair sprouting like grass.… ...continue reading

Lisa Romeo teaches creative nonfiction in Bay Path University’s online MFA, and at colleges and other settings in New Jersey. Her nonfiction is listed in Best American Essays 2016, and has appeared in The New York Times, O-The Oprah Magazine, Brevity, Hippocampus, Brain Child, Under the Sun, and Purple Clover.

Please describe your duties as editor/writer:

My own writing is mostly creative nonfiction—memoir and essays. These are published in literary journals, as well as mainstream media (newspaper, magazine, websites). I also contribute to essay anthologies and have both a memoir manuscript and an essay collection currently being submitted to publishers.

I also provide a range of editorial services for writers of fiction and nonfiction, from short pieces up to book-length manuscripts, book proposals, and other materials.… ...continue reading

     On this path in the city fens
the man walking in front of me
 listens too to the geese and jays
  reporting their morning news

                    In a ragged jacket
and filthy chinos   he’s steady
on his feet

        I watch him study reflections
of reeds and sky in the shallow stream
edged by rocks and debris… ...continue reading

All the time I am that nursery rhyme
the one where all the sisters build themselves with weakness
saying, no, no, you cannot come in
and yet he takes down their houses anyway,
that bad, bad wolf they don’t know
belonged in them before they were themselves,
you see, this is why
they build their homes of weak things;

only straw, only sticks.

As for that third one with the bricks,
she is only acting hard,
she will open the door and invite him in for tea
if he wants some.

– Penney Knightly… ...continue reading