Hey friends of Flyway, read on below for some of our editor’s selected reads from around the web. Happy November!

 “Choom” / by: Jenny Boully (nonfiction in Brevity)
Through a concise and lyrical list of details about a woman, BaNoi, a child deciphers her bewildering life.

“Mother says she would not like to die in this country; she says that when she dies, if she should die here, please take her home; she does not like what they do to dead bodies in this country; she says she will need monks to help carry her home.”

“Hostages” / by Shannon Heffernan (fiction in Annalemma)
Twin sisters negotiate secrets and their evolving relationship amidst a hostage situation happening in a nearby apartment building.

“Karen sits back in the tub. For a second she seems like a stranger and I try to figure out if she’s beautiful or ugly. But I love her and hate her too much to know what either of us really looks like.”

 “Of Belief in the Nonexistence in Worlds that are Not our Own” and “Scenes from a Massacre” / by John Fenlon Hogan (poetry in Sixth Finch)
I don’t really know what to say about these poems except that, after reading them, I wanted to find and immediately read Hogan’s other work!

“And I have seen enough movies to know / that I don’t know the world is almost / ending often, and I know of no other way / to woo her than with a sense of too much / fate.”

“Anatomy” / by: Valerie Wetlaufer (poetry in The Journal)
Birds and the body. Gorgeous language. Even the form attempts flight right out of this poem.

“My best lines to you are composed on vellum, the skin of a stillborn lamb. / I scrape the hide clean, / remove the hairs and rub it smooth with pumice.”

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