Editor’s Page for Yellow
Mama Issue #87 – Aug. 15, 2021
Summer is raging, right now. Sometimes we feel
married to our A/Cs. We bitch about heat, and in the winter, we bitch about
snow. Still, as long as the sun’s up till 8 PM, I’m happy. It’ll get dark at
4:30 soon enough.
The pandemic is still with us, with new
variants. It’s so frustrating. We take a few steps forward, then back again. Will
all this ever end?
At Yellow Mama we do our best to distract
you from real-life horrors with powerful noir and crime stories and poetry. And
guess what? In honor of our 15th-Anniversary issue (#90 – Feb. 15,
2022), we’re having a Valentine’s Day flash fiction contest! Check the
navigation bar on the Home Page for details.
This issue we have a sensational lineup:
In Kenneth James Crist’s “The Gas Man,”
vigilante Crank masquerades as a utilities guy to avenge his niece’s death. Elena
E. Smith’s “Ray’s Mistake” pits a trucker against a grieving widower with a
secret. In C. A. Rowland’s tale, a man is found with “Four Slugs” in him, four
years after his disappearance. And in Zachariah Johnson’s story, a close-mouthed
teen is still “One-Armed and Dangerous.”
Other fine stories include Alison Kaiser’s “Lorraine’s
Recipe,” in which a battered wife finds a delicious way to reverse her
situation. Jon Park’s “Deep” gives us a new meaning to the term “being
neighborly.” And in Vinnie Hansen’s moving “Dead Revival,” a meth head turned
Dead Head finds a surrogate mother during an attempted robbery.
Our poetry lineup includes phenomenal poems by
Meg Baird, Richard LeDue, Otto Burnwell, Scott Cumming, and even some
pre-Halloween works by the chilling John Grey!
Full-length and flash fiction stories (and some
poems) are individually illustrated by our gifted artists: Kevin Duncan,
Hillary Lyon, Steve Cartwright, Ann Marie Rhiel, Michael D. Davis, Darren
Blanch, Henry Stanton, Cynthia Fawcett, KJ Hannah Greenberg, Jack Real, and Mike
Knowles.
And check out our “beach” collage cover
by Keith
Coates Walker!
If you want to submit full-length fiction,
flash fiction, or poetry, check out our guidelines page.
Also, please sign our guestbook! If you
have comments about Yellow Mama or any stories or poems we publish,
you may leave comments there.
And check out our revised Archives, to catch
recent stories or poems by your favorite writers you might’ve missed.
Most of all, thanks for reading!
