Michael McInnis

From Up on the Row of Garage Roofs We Threw Broken Shingles Down at the Cops

my mother
heard my description
over the scanner
I told her I had
never seen
Orion brighter,
but Kahoutek looked
like a dirty
smudge in the
rake of blue
light.

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, The Commonline Journal, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine and Yellow Chair Review to name a few.

Heidi Blakeslee

My Roots of Loneliness

my mother's favorite
thing to do with us when we
were little kids was to
dump us off at someone else's house
or leave us
with a babysitter

in the summers, when
we had off
she would take us to a park
in Conneautville
in sweltering heat
and leave us there all day
with some sort of poorly-run
situation for low-income families

we would eat a bag lunch
consisting of a sandwich, a piece of fruit
and a carton of chocolate milk

it wasn't all bad
i learned to play chess there,
and sometimes I would make
a friend for a day

we would walk the block or so away
to go to the library

but i remember spending
the majority of the days
waiting for my mother
to pick us up
in the minivan

for her to love us
and be with us

however
briefly

Heidi Blakeslee lives and writes in Ambridge, Pa.  She has been published in many chapbooks, zines, and newsletters over the years.  She also has two poetry books, "The Empress of Hours," and "Should the Need Arise," a memoir, "The White Cat: A Paranormal Memoir," and a novel, "Strange Man: The Edgar Allan Foe," available on amazon.com. 

Scott Wozniak

Sweat to Live

Today

I was at work

shoveling dirt,

moving

wheelbarrows

and carrying

cinder blocks

from here

to there.

 

During all this

I realized I

will most-likely

never receive

easy money

for my poems.

 

Then I thought

of the one word,

Yamrus poem,

“Endure,”

 

and how he’d

summed up

my whole

life.

Scott Wozniak is a poet and chaos enthusiast who's work has been widely published both online and in-print. Most recently, he was featured in the Lummox #5 Anthology. Also, look for his work in the Svensk Apache Press anthology, due out this fall. You can follow him on twitter @sewozniak.