magnolia Magnolia

A Florida Journal of Literary & Fine Arts

Cross Creek
Cross Creek
photo by
C. Robinson

To Be Recited in Staggered Union
by Alex Cigale

Jack once told me a devastating thing
At all times he had to feel ecstatic
Which through drugs sex and writing he could
He fully intended  to drink himself to death

At a party Mill Valley On the Road
Kerouac lying prostrate on the floor
Everyone thought he was drunk and passed out
Years later the night’s conversation recurred

Whole-cloth eternal in The Dharma Bums
Rexroth transformed into Mister Peanut
Ferlinghetti’s chatter about Breton
Became “The fish of the sea speak of bait”

The end came when the writing stopped working
We see with our hands we touch with our eyes
My hands have forgotten so many things
A great soul is forgiven fatal flaws

 
vines

Cedar Key
by Nadine Purvis Schmidt

It was an old-Florida, small-town island then:

White-sand roads,

Souvenir shops with seashell ashtrays
and alligators (porcelain and otherwise),

Driftwood-grey restaurants, some on stilts,
one with hearts of palm and
pale green dressing on the salad.

In the parking lot outside another,
balanced on its shell-tail-end
by two men (a third with a hose),
was a giant sea turtle.
(It was still legal to eat them then.)

As big as my then-child’s frame,
it glistened for a moment in water and morning sun,
never to be seen again.

 

On the Riverboat Casting Shadows Overboard
by Eve Anthony Hanninen

She leans over the railing.  Nothing in her hands
but the sticky residue of what slipped through clumsy fingers—
almost-lovers’ highly-charged interjections.  But nothing

left of amatory crusades, no hydrotactic epiphanies,
except the fluttering wake as the boat shores north.
The river’s a black hole for her near-silent sobs, devouring

those inaudible gasps in one vast gulp, as though they’re hopeless
frozen stars, gaslight novas and deep space dust.  This is not grief
billowing free, but the years’ empty moments carved in bas relief.

 
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Magnolia Florida Journal              Last Updated June 7, 2010

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