Nathan Graziano

Sunday Morning in Middle Age

Before stepping into the shower I remember

a segment from the Nightly News where researchers

in some prestigious university discovered the number

of push-ups a man can do has a direct correlation

to the likelihood of developing heart disease  

so as the shower ran and the mirrors misted up

I hit the deck to determine when I would die,

my palms pressed to the tiles, my arms shaking.

If I could hit twenty, I’d reduce my chance of a stroke

by sixty-four percent, according to the researchers.

There’s no suspense here, folks. After ten push-ups,

I dropped flat to my belly on the bathroom rug, done.

A forty-three year old man, found dead in a bathroom

in his boxer shorts beside a toilet—an ugly obituary.

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife and kids. His books include Teaching Metaphors (Sunnyoutside Press), After the Honeymoon (Sunnyoutside Press) Hangover Breakfasts (Bottle of Smoke Press in 2012), Sort Some Sort of Ugly (Marginalia Publishing in 2013), and My Next Bad Decision (Artistically Declined Press, 2014). Almost Christmas, a collection of short prose pieces, was published by Redneck Press in 2017. Graziano writes a baseball column for Dirty Water Media in Boston. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.  

David Bulley

Business lessons

At times, in my travels through the wild snowy places

I’ve stepped on the nothing about half an inch above the snow

So that I left no track, disturbed nothing,

ghosting past exhausted deer and moose huffing through chest deep drifts

Searching out that last spruce bud within reach.

By sheer coincidence, I happen to always be alone

On these sorties so that, having left no track,

I’ve also left no proof of my passing.

One time I stomped through deep snow from

One copse to another, sweating and heaving

Behind me, single file, a herd of deer picked and snickered in my wake.

When we arrived, they frolicked at

an ecstatic pace until all the snow was tamped down and walkable

Cleverly lifting their reach to the tiny buds, they could not touch before.

I tasted a tiny maple bud

masticating, zen-like and found it good.

We all chewed for awhile and contemplated Thoreau

David Bulley writes poems and songs and stories and shares them with people he thinks might enjoy it. He is an administrator in a high school. Also he can stand flat footed and piss over a dump truck.

James Croal Jackson

Condensation

We used to be the same, used to

dance in living rooms in Grandview

houses, drunk on homemade Moscow

Mules in copper mugs, and then

you said you would no longer

drink, but you’d watch with

a glass of empty icewater,

drip out the fronts of bars

without a noise.

James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Columbia Journal, Rattle, and Reservoir. He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. (jimjakk.com)  

Chuka Susan Chesney

Runaway Blues

Does Momma know I jump rope behind trees?

she hunts for me

she’s got the whip

she wants to kick me in the hip

but I slip ’n slide to neighbor’s gate

if I’m not too late

I’ll hide and seek

She is moaning her eyes rolling like dice

I switchback trail

Spirograph through deer uphill

under sycamores like G.I. Jill

I shimmy the chimney incinerator

see View Master slides of houses below

I hear her shrill, her Gumby legs splayed 

Barbie Doll wig unnaturally askew

The pool is powder 

a Kool-Aid blue 

lemon bush abuzz with creepy crawlers

I stay away until it’s cool as marbles

Then in obscurity I boomerang

stand on balcony see her wax lips  

she speaks & spells Ephesians under solitary spot

her mirthful mood afloat in magic 8-ball

I tinker toy through basement she doesn’t know I’m here

lock the doorknob to my bedroom 

now she’s jigsawing a puzzle

If I hear her bobby pin the keyhole

I’ll have time to slinky

out my open window

Chuka Susan Chesney has a BFA in Fashion Illustration from Art Center College of Design and an MAT from Occidental College. She is an artist, poet, curator, and editor. Her award-winning paintings and sculpture have been shown in galleries all over the country. Her poems have been published on three continents. "You Were a Pie So We Ate You", a book of Chesney's poems was the winner of the 2018 San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest. In October 2018, Chesney curated the "I Pity da Poe" exhibition at the Hive Gallery in Downtown L.A. In November, Chesney hosted a poetry reading with Don Kingfisher Campbell at the YEAR ONE exhibition featuring Loren Philip and Tomoaki Shibata's collaborative art at Castelli Art Space in Mid City. Chesney's anthology of poetry and art "Lottery Blues", coedited by Ulrica Perkins will be published by Little Red Tree Publishing in 2019.

Mari Deweese

Freebleeder

I used to think that 

bleached and processed

tree pulp would 

be enough to catch and carry

emptied contents

of my womb.

But I am older now,

accessing and liberating 

the wiser pain. 

I let flow a funnel

into the world, knowing

what I did not know, 

that words, like blood,

don't belong in a can,

and only cling to inside walls 

for so long before

the source goes septic.

Mari Deweese lives outside of Memphis, and dreams of a place with an actual autumn. Her first book, Kinky Keeps the House Clean, was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2017, and her next collection of poetry will drop from the gibbet in fall 2019.

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg 

We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard.

The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip 

and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,

either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped 

the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first

to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to

let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction 

of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. 

We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet 

in those moments of a cold November day, we watched 

a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat 

a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.

Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Review, and Like Light anthology of Bright Hill Press. She is a literary consultant and teaches poetry and publishing workshops. 

Tobi Alfier

Loving Emily

I went to her house.

You were lounged on her couch

in a jacket I didn’t know you owned,

feet up on her shabby table,

reading in silence.

I said let’s call Emily,

swing by her man’s house

and all meet for dinner.

You said something

I don’t recall, and I went

for the phone. On the floor,

four perfect stapled pages,

lined like your beloved

yellow pads. The heading said:

“The Week of Loving Emily”

Four pages of poems I didn’t know,

sent off to journals obscure to me,

the last two to the army. I knew

Emily’s man, a caber tossing

roughneck of a bloke, did not

write these. I knew they were yours.

Emily answered quite chirpy,

got less and less so as she explained

that no, it would not be a good

idea, her man was playing music

with friends, did not want company—

I was sad, got more and more down

as she spoke. I knew you were

not coming home with me.

Emily had a Scottish accent,

you did as well. I just left,

I don’t know how I sounded,

just broken hearted.

Massage Chairs

Crumpled – dollars pulled out of your pocket,

thrown on the table with almost disdain.

The way you form your lips when trying to

whistle, crooked and crumpled.  How I

feel when I fold myself on the massage chair,

legs turned under like the wings

of a bird fallen from under the eaves before

learning to fly.  Palms up in quiet surrender

I let everything go, folded and breathing

while a man who I don’t know

lifts my hair once, twice, and

lays palms to places only lovers should explore.

You don’t go there.  Ever?  I can’t remember.

I share secrets I don’t even know.

Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. Her full-length collection “Somewhere, Anywhere, Doesn’t Matter Where” was published by Kelsay Books. “Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies” was published by Cholla Needles Press. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).