by Jim Ross
Inside An Ancient House
Inside an ancient house, a window pouring
down with age. The world blurred and thickened
through the glass pooled at the window’s base, through
the mass of what could still come in, the light.
I grew taller, looked up higher. You wrote
to me about a boy who went to war.
He was old. You put his words down for him.
As the boat pushed off, he stood on the deck
and wanted a smoke. When no one was looking,
he peeled off a piece of his lip with his teeth.
Meghan Kemp-Gee lives somewhere between Vancouver BC and Fredericton NB. She writes poetry, comics, and scripts of all kinds. She co-created the webcomics Contested Strip and Space Heroines of El-Andoo, and her comics and short fiction have been published in numerous anthologies.Her poetry has appeared in journals including PRISM, Copper Nickel, Rising Phoenix Review, The Shore, Stone of Madness, Altadena Poetry Review, Anomaly, Train, and Rejection Letters. She studied at Amherst College and Chapman University and is currently a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding public health research career in hopes of resuscitating his long-neglected right brain. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in the past six years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and photography in over 175 journals on five continents. Publications include 580 Split, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Columbia Journal, Feral, Hippocampus, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Lunch Ticket, Manchester Review, Newfound, Stonecoast, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. He’s published photo essays in Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, Sweet, and Wordpeace. He’s also published photo essays using old postcards in Barren, Ilanot Review and Palaver (forthcoming). Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five—split their time between city and mountains.