My neighbor is a spider farmer. Spiders settle on the plants by his living room window. “I’m harvesting their silk,” he explains. “It’s as strong as steel.”
“What will you build?”
“A shield over my heart. A patch over the hole in the sky.” His wife had been high up in the Towers. He points at the bare skyline out the window. “I’ll drape a web over the city that will blind the sky with its own sunlight, so the next plane will splinter against the wall of webs.” He scratches his head. “Or a parachute to jump from the next burning building. Do you know that many spiders can make parachutes?”
I don’t know this. I watch a spider parachute from his ceiling. If I squint closely, it looks like a tiny lady falling from the sky.…
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Glen Phillips is the publisher of Front Porch Review, a quarterly online literary magazine based in IL.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
Front Porch Review is an online literary journal whose intended audience is the older members of our population and whose contributors have, in the most part come late to the creativity game. I act as editor and publisher, improving the approved submissions when necessary (the misuse of basic punctuation is appalling) and then alerting its avid readers to its availability on a quarterly basis.
Tell us about your career.
I toiled in the vineyards of educational and IT publishing as editor, writer, product designer, subject matter expert, business manager, and other menial roles not worth mentioning. After forty years of such effort, I decided that the best I could do for the common good was to build an electronic front porch.…
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Sometimes when I close my eyes
The landscape dissolves
And I am two-thirds the wind
And one-third a boy in the city.
You will find me among
The high-rises hiding leaves
In dim-lit corners,
Pulling the fire-alarms
And filling the halls
With painted flames.
You’d be scared
If they weren’t the color
Of bad ideas,
The ill-planned blues
That are easily distinguishable
From real ceruleans.
But still, plastic or not,
I am incredibly happy.
Beneath these trees
I never accomplish anything,
And I haven’t moved
In thirty years.
– Seth Jani…
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My morning run GoFunds my soul.
A nighthawk calls from a roadside bush
quieting my muddled brain.
An owl hoots from a distant woods
drawing me into the present, in time to spot
a deer emerging from a cornfield,
a rabbit racing down the side of the road.
Fog settles in, providing inner calm.
Physically spent, spiritually rejuvenated,
I can now try to face the morning newspaper so that
the confluence of headlines becomes palatable.
U.S. to spend 1.8 billion on nukes
Experts offer tips on avoiding injuries
while conducting your fall clean-up
9,000 Syrian civilians killed in the last year
When is too early to decorate for autumn?
National Guard called out to end Lakota ceremonies
surrounding pipeline protest
But disbelief, sadness, and anger build,
and then are assuaged by working with animals at the rehab center
and penning letters to Congress.…
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Writer and photographer Michael Dickel has work in several print and online publications. He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010), and was managing editor for arc-23 and -24. His most recent book, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden, came out in 2016. Previous books are: War Surrounds Us, Midwest / Mid-East, and The World Behind It, Chaos… He has taught at colleges and universities in both Israel and the U.S.
– Michael Dickel…
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Barricading himself and a hostage in the Super 8 was not the best decision Tommy had ever made, but he couldn’t face the cops who waited in the pouring rain. He couldn’t face anything outside, couldn’t even face the mirror. He had screwed it all up; he had spun and dodged and dickered with responsibilities all his life, his father’s shadow hooping his hopes and dreams. He was so afraid of being like the old man he didn’t have a chance of becoming anybody else. “Baby, don’t peek through the blinds,” he said. “I can’t let you out. I need you. You’re all I’ve got.”
“What are you going to do?” Michelle wanted to know, and her voice blended with the thunder and lightning. At first, she had shaken all over and cried when he wouldn’t let her leave.…
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Garner adjusted his mask, pulling the Plastiskin(TM) tight against his throat. He flashed two fingers to his clone who stood at the end of the hall. He wanted to make sure Garner2 knew to wait a couple of minutes before knocking on the door.
His clone answered with a smile.
Garner was glad he’d programmed the clone to smile like a normal person. Lexa never liked how uneasy his own smiles were and now he could see why. Watching Garner2, he felt a sense of warmth. If he wanted to smile like that, he’d have to learn to do it the old-fashioned way: practice. No way would he install a personality chip in his own head. There were limits to his love and the risk of unleashing a computer virus in his brain was one of them.…
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