By Derek Jon Dickinson
Featured Art: “Grass Pathway” by Madelyn Bartolone

I lift myself, pinch my hat, splash some coins against my debt. Crusts of dried swallows in the emptied pint-glass. Outside, the moon is a wooden button through its slit of Gaelic wool. The pub is a cask of fermenting voices, windows oily with yellow light; night melting inside me, like a given kiss, or warm wobble of whiskey. South—my soles scuffed with work, clicking the dew-glistening cobble, the brook-straddling bridge; water, fragile as flute-glass, tinkling the stone sluice. Moonlight stitching the fraying salmon; lidless eyes, cold as premonition; tails pulsing like sunken sails. The coming car-light snips me like scissors from the black pitch night, its red taillights trailing-off as errant sparks. Home—wafts of sweet peat-smoke, a tune rolling around like a marble in my mouth. With sun-chipped hands, I work the turf-stove’s iron latch; strip-off my clothes, naked as a wet salmon, strumming the sheets upstream; thumb denting the clay slab of my wife’s hip. 

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Derek Jon Dickinson is a writer and photographer living in Minnesota. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transformations: An Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology (UK), TriQuarterly, Zone 3, The Manhattan Review, LIT Magazine, Poet Lore, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), and other places. His waterfowl photography has been published by Ducks Unlimited.