Issue 1 / May 2017

Writing brings a calm fulfillment that only comes when creating stories on that blank sheet of paper.Piper Templeton

Piper Templeton

Why I Write

In the last year, I’ve taken an active, more formal approach to my writing by publishing an indie book on Kindle and CreateSpace, which led to submitting short stories here on bookscover2cover. However, looking back, the writer has always lived inside of me, that compulsion other authors will recognize to create stories on a blank sheet of paper. My earliest writing memory goes back to grade school. I was around ...

Heather Gehron-Rice

Water’s Machines

Water wheels grind wheat and corn, drive the bellows that heat the iron furnace. We think we harness the water, in reality we are only borrowing its power. Paddle boats roam the rivers, the rivers that provide their power. Steam engines, invented in my own back yard, combine fire and water for greater purpose. The mighty Susquehanna powers a dam, the dam turns water into electricity. One leads to the ...

Heather Gehron-Rice

Water’s Secrets

I wonder what she would tell me if I could understand Like spies of any age, I want the key to the code that will unlock her secrets. Oceans Secrets of the deep Our desire to know drives us ever deeper Struggling to crack the code Yearning to understand our siblings Whale, Orca, Dolphin Do we really want to know what they have to say? Rivers Secret patterns of movement ...

Cynthia Megill

Waiting On Life

Waiting on Life The silhouette of an old woman rests against the window of her car. A red light gives her time to muse. She remembers translucent memories and holds her gaze steady. She is long past the memories of porcelain words uttered in false wisdom, broken utterances dropped like smashed plates on the dinning room floor. But she remembers the drive home. Seeing bronzed faces of men, Men with ...

Michael Radcliffe

The Call of the Dragons

Thunder echoed in the distance as the rain pelted down, the cold, fat drops of water crashing against the traveler’s cloak. Tattered and frayed at the edges, one could tell from a distance the cloak and its owner had seen far better days. Shuffling forward in the darkness, the figure finally reached the doorway of a ramshackle inn at the end of the street. A battered and faded sign hung ...

Daphne Deeds

The Big Picture

Field Kallop is an artist whose primary tool is gravity. Her exhibition, The Melody of Structures, recently on view at The Tremaine Gallery, was an elegant contemplation of physics, mathematics, and the unseen structure of nature. The work is hard to categorize because it is at once drawing, sculpture, installation, and, during a public event when she constructed the piece, performance. As approximately fifty observers stood around the periphery of ...

Pam Lazos

Talk to the Stones

Doc rose from his bed where he’d spent the last few hours. Ready or not, he had to speak with her. Celia lived only a mile away. Harley could stay with her, go to the same school, keep the same friends, live the same life. Plus there was the added benefit of Celia being Ellie’s twin. Harley might find herself in a parallel universe of sorts, Ellie gone, but not ...

Cynthia Megill

Sinking Daystar

Sinking Daystar I have seen 23,011 sunsets or so. Each one different than the night before. Each one a newborn, crying out on an early eve. There is something about a newborn cry. Your heart opens wider just at the sound. Your eyes are softer. Your soul more gentler. Their inch high fingers touch the sky. They enkindle the heavens. The clouds light up. Laden booties stamp golden dust from ...

Katja Pinkston

How I Met My Neighbors

The eggplant was slowly sizzling in the pan on top of my stove when the front doorbell rang. I peered out the kitchen window. A stranger stood outside our duplex. Not that I knew many people anyway. The military had just moved us into this German house less than three weeks ago. A glance at the eggplant pieces in the pan told me that they still needed a good ten ...

Sue Blake

Heiress

I dreamed I had me a daughter, magnificent as a field of corn swaying in the sun, at peace with what she knew and free. I dreamed of how I saw her grow, season by season. I dreamed of all the little things she’d find beautiful in the world that I could never see any beauty in till she showed me them up close. And she was generous like that, ...

Jan McMillan

Gypsy Heart

Home is where the heart is, the saying goes. I bow to my gypsy heart And the many places I have loved. I. Oklahoma I was a child here, Feeling the way only children can– Learning what children learn– All life around me mysterious– In touch with my senses Of touch, smell, taste, sound. Pictures petrified with companion feelings Remain. Storms turning the mid-day skies to black Send us running ...

Cynthia Megill

For the keeper of words

Words are tough enough, and now you tell me to measure them in meter and rhyme. To dress them, position them like fruit in a bowl. Words, ink blots, charcoal smears, audibles, never good enough, always second best. Word sage? Please, tell me how to put fire words on a cold line, tell me how to save the gut words that drown in my throat, the ones that never reach ...