JP Reese quit writing for six years. Who knows why? She teaches recalcitrant students at a college in a red zone and now writes feverishly to take the edge off. She's been published in many places and writes in various genres, but likes poetic language best. Reese is a poetry editor for THIS Literary Magazine and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. When not writing, she is reading and rereading anything by Richard Ford and Thomas Wolfe wondering how in god's name they manage to do that and make it seem so effortless. Read her published work at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty jpreese.tumblr.com

For The Lost Boys (October 25, 2011. Issue 32.)

A milky-eyed dog yips in dreams. Gray muzzle, matted hair, a limp his medal of heroic dog battles with buses and postman shoes. A tattered tail batons a medleyof insect song on a shotgun house's back porch. A brave dog, he fought to acquire important dog things: squirrel tartare, whisker of cat, abundant fornication; his boy's gentle hand only a wag away. Things happen to young black boys at the bottom of this place. An education stands no shield when drunken blood sport bullets by with the flash of a gang sign, a chain's sharp edges, and a singing Mac10 to obliterate a face. Banded black arms strain against the pull of brass handles bolted into wood. A mother's legs give way, and she must be carried to her chair. The raw earth beneath the mourners' feet is covered with a cape of green. The future of a family is buried in Reverend Gray's churchyard as an old dog waits at home. Blind, the dog points his nose to the crowd shuffling into the empty house searching for the scent of a boy who will never become a man.