Ashley Adler. I am Light and Caffeine

I am Light and Caffeine Asblq Adler

I am light and caffeine, a winged crearure fluttering over flower petals drinking necrar like champagne from their palms. I soar over citrus-flavored waterfalls and alight on the grass near your sleeping form. I touch your lips with my sugar frosted kiss. You awake but lie still and pretend to sleep as I nibble my way from your shoulder up your neck to your ear. Just as I nuzzle your hair, you make your move, throwing me tumbling unro my back and pouncing on me like a chocolate-mint striped tiger. You pin me to the ground, slightly crumbling gauzy spun sugar gossamer beneath me. Your mint eyes look into me, chocolate melting into ice. As we melt into each other our sweat and desire blend into an elixir soaked with energy and iust. Afterwards we lie in the grass, chlorophyll colored stains on our knees and backs. \We drift off into candyland dreams of spun sugar eyelashes gathering chocolate raindrops. \flhen I awake, you are gone.

The raln comes

Zeke Zaerow

The rain comes, the rain comes, the rain comes, The world's ritual bathing A divine cleansing as old as time.

Heralded by the stillness of the wind And the misty vapor that the surrounding life exciudes While the skies: dim, mute, and empty, rest The impartial clouds spiral above As if begging you to direct them.

It stans with the staccato explosions of liquid on the leaves, roof, and glass And you sit silent and still in your darkened room Comforted by knowing once again that all is right and good

\Xiith the windows open the pleasant chill gusts swirl around you Steadily entering and exiting your little world As the vrorld itself breathes comfort and release

Now flows the deluge, erasing the evidence of today Rinsing blood from the streets, smell from the ground Tears from the eyes grime from the face dirt from the hands and sweat from the body Guilt from the soul

Demons from the mind Troubles from the earth

Turning a lover's hair into perfect ringlets And a child's art into a blank slate

To be filled again romorrow

In the surreal haze bodies and cars flow past like waves Rolling in, cresting and receding forrh

The torrent lasts forever, turning reality into one ecstatic instant of sound and sensation

Lose yourself in the maelstrom

Until consciousness slowly, sweetly returns Leaving you alone with the final drips . . . drops, a breath of wind, and a lingering scent in the air Like that of an absent friend And you wait

Until the next quiet day

Napkins and Forks

Lrq \Vilson

And Jimmy was beautiful Jimmy was like soul-on-soul on my morning toast

Grooving my eyes into steady repetition Hypnotized -y anticipation of movemenr I swear to you I could not avoid him FIe was like sunny-side-up love infiltrating my sysrems like a planned attack upon my senses Systematically seducing them One by

one And I swear to you I could not resist him

And yet Jimmy sar rhere like Plain-Jane-Jim unaware of my perverse breakfast fantasies

Constantly alluding to rhe hot coffee on the table that remained yet untouched and cooling by the minure and beautiful manifestations of orange juice drenched in eyes only for you

t

John Clark

Da Field Digital Pbotograpb

thts ts what hapyened.:

prose

t

ffi

qk

,} q*

Walter

Jwstin Perez

Sitting on his side of the bed, (on tbe rigbt,IVaher, aluays on tbe rigbt, yow can't sit on the left or else you'll . . .), he sits upright, back against the wooden headboard, watching the bedroom door. FIe can feel the cool wood through his white t-shirt, although it is more appropriate to say off-white t-shirc, given the number of stains down the front and around the armpits, and he begins to wonder how much longer it would take her to waddle up the stairs, and get-no, slide, or grouse, anything but simply ger-into bed beside him. The rifle was threaded through his right upraised knee, resting on the thigh of his outstretched left leg, concealed beneath the white satin sheets she had insisted they buy in Miami. He had taken careful measure of the bed on those oh-so-rare but oh-so-crucial days when she was not home, calculating not once, not twice, but three times just where he needed to be so that the discharge of the rifle wouldn't harm him. In the precious few moments he had had to recover the gun from its hiding place and get into position beneath the sheets, he had consulted the diagrams he had so meticulously laid out in his brain. The plan, of course, was not to kill her at first, no oh no,'Walter could never conceive of a thing like that, he silently reassured himself. She would slip-no, slide-in next to him, and in that whispery voice of hers she the errands he needed would to run run down an the next day. agenda 'Walter of is all reminiscent of nights when he loved listening to her talk, but all he can picture now is the glare of the table side lamp off of the oil on her skin, the way the dandruff in her eyebrows fluttered onto her long, pointed nose. He had decided that it was at the end of her nightly chore list

that he would let her have it. But not to kill her, mind you. The bullet would pierce her upper thigh and merely handicap her for . . . oh who cares how long? Long enough for'Walter to make absolutely clear that he was the man in this marriage, rhar she couldn't boss him around anymore, that she couldn't embarrass him in front of her friends, or HIS friends, for that marter. He shivered slightly, almost hearing her laugh, and also realizing he only had a paLr of boxers on. He had laid the plastic underneath the fitter sheet the night before, being careful to fold the edges under like his morher taught him (preci-

sion is tbe kqt, W'alter, precision, medsure tr.uice, cnt once, or eke you'll. . .). H. glanced under the sheet at the weapon cocooned there when (creak). She's coming, he thought. He could feel his head starr to lighten, the butterflies (motbs) in his stomach started getting rowdy, and a second after the first creah of the staircase under his wife's weight, there is silence. And in that one moment of silence, as his wife starts inching her way up ro her new future,'Walter realizes one detail that he missed. Overlooked, in all the hours of dreaming, plotting, scheming (precision), he had forgotten one aspecr of his wife's nightly ritual that could ruin his oh so imporrant plan. The bathroom. FIe jumped out of bed, knocking over the glass of now-cool warm milk he always prepared himself before going to sleep. Tonight, however, the milk was untouched, and a lukewarm spray of white was now engulfing the sides of the nightstand, the lamp, and the Oriental rug that had been in his wife's family f.or (generations and generation) quite a while. The lamp, in addition to being splattered with curdling milk, has also been jolted by'S7'alter's sudden explosion out of bed, during which he bumped the nightstand. In perfect silence, it starts it's short decent to rhe carpeted and milky floor. The light bulb shatrers as she reaches the top of the stairs.