Friday Night I’m gonna smoke all your cigarettes, Make you go crazy trying to figure out if I’m really that girl in the album liner notes of your favorite band. You pour your beer in the trash, refuse to drink the backwash. But hell, it’s Friday night and there’s more than leftover beer in your future and mine. We think about fooling around, but the couch is full of passed out hippies and covered in cigarette burns, and shit, it isn’t even our house. I bum your last smoke but your lighter is dead. Kinda like tonight you joke and I give you a pity laugh. Karen Cline-Tardiff has been writing as long as she could hold a pen. Her works have appeared in several anthologies and journals, both online and in print. She founded the Aransas County Poetry Society. She has a Kindle book of poetry, Stumbling to Breathe. She is Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
To The Thinking Camel Cricket That bent-legged audacity compelling your jumping cockeyed bravery to cross thresholds, climb silently through damp basement spaces to enter darkened dwellings only to receive a post-shriek boot to your humped back, a trigger-forced splash of spray, or a body glued immovable-- Once I understood your blind defenselessness, seemingly random leaps meant to terrify your own larger fears, my unease around you lessened Still, though take your crooked-bodied friends and get out of my house. Rebecca M. Ross is originally from Brooklyn but currently lives, hikes, and teaches in New York’s Hudson Valley. Rebecca’s writing has recently been published in Uppagus , Whimsical Poet , Streetcake Magazine , The Westchester Review , Soul-Lit, and Peeking Cat . She has poetry forthcoming or published in Last Leaves, Pif Magazine, and The Metaworker .