Melissa Eleftherion

 swallow erasure

flashing white underparts

the violet swallows

the tree dark breast

of diagnostic

erratic abundant

all rump and face

all hard for the flight itself

perch of

throat & siren

Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a cis queer human, a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & numerous chapbooks, including little ditch (above/ground press, 2018) & trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020). Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa created, developed, and co-curates The SFSU Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange with Elise Ficarra. She now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

Timothy Gager

New York Confession

New York was hard to find
only if I pealed the onion,
I can pray for sleep to overtake

the stumble, into place
and stumble out, never saw
what’s in front of my face:

Life’s jugglers, clowns, the beat
masters of three card monte, I
won then the stakes got higher

in a city of nightmares,
morning, afternoon, night
feel like different places
unless troubled, they merged
into one, I was awake through all
waiting for the city to let me go

forced to sing myself to supper
by climbing the highest mountains
the trees in The Village.

On 2nd street, and Avenue C
I was lost, even with obvious
nomenclature of the corner

smack in the middle in the intersection,
my arms stretched out, Jesus,
4 AM, begging for crucifixion.

Timothy Gager is the author of fifteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest, Spreading Like Wild Flowers,is his eighth of poetry. Timothy hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in was the co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival. He has had over 600 works of fiction and poetry published, of which seventeen have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio. Timothy is the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts with some fish and two rabbits, and he is employed as a social worker. He is currently seeking representation for his third novel, Joe the Salamander, a semi-finalist for The Holland Prize.

Jeff Weddle

And So It Goes

Naked and forgetting
the safety of sheets
she stands by
a dirty window
of dead flies
and open curtains

gazing at
the half-empty
parking lot.

A young man
walking to his car
fails to notice
her accidental gift
of beauty

his mind caught
on the one
he has abandoned
in a different room

while her puzzled lover
asks again
why she has left the bed

and the young man
starts his car
and pulls away

with no idea
where the night
will take him

and she says aloud
she is not sure
why she was
ever there
at all.

Visiting Home 

On the church steps
with grey and purple clouds
and the night songs
of animals
cars going somewhere
with their lights and noise
fireflies and a man running
as my father
back at the house
is caught
in a failing body
barely able to move
in his ancient black recliner
and my mother watches him
for signs of need
but seeing none
settles on
cleaning his denture
in this last
bit of smoke
when we are all
still alive
trying to understand
each mystery
except
how lonely
the end can be

Jeff Weddle is a poet and writer living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He won the 2007 Welty Prize for Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, and has also received honors for his fiction and poetry. Jeff teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama.

Steven Breyak

Netflix and Chill

We used to know the best restaurants
and everybody in them. We knew every party
and everyone knew our names. Now we sit and watch
the newborn as if his crib were a TV
we can reach into and feel the warm pressure
of new stories grabbing hold. And just that
is so much bigger than anything until now. That me
before this is someone I know, I remember, but not me.

I expected to grow into this role. Instead a moment
ticked by and the software had changed. Every thought
is now a father’s thought. And this is just a tease
to what it must have been for you. Thread by thread
building in you, tearing through you while all
I could do was wait, absorbed in all I couldn’t do.
And now this little creature plugs into
you, feeds from you. Our lives’ spin-off.

Months later, while I video his first bites
of mashed banana, as you hold him in your arms
you’ll cry for this beginning, this end. When I ask,
looking through my screen, if you’re crying, I’ll hear
that I’m crying. We’ll laugh and cry. We’ll joke
about all the beer and coffee you’ll be drinking soon.
We’ll celebrate the life growing from us,
over us as we try to take it all in.

Steven Breyak lives with his wife and son in Osaka. There he teaches English at a high school and two universities. You can find more of his work here and elsewhere on the internet with a quick search. You can find another of his recent poems in Gargoyle #73. He makes a pretty mean gin tonic, too. Useful in these times.

John Riley

A Hundred Thousand Rivers

He went to sleep in a dream
seventy years from The War
sleep walked like a stranger into the swamp
dead he swelters
behind the rusted screen door
watching the dunes change shape
in the half-light before the storm
disorders them and tomorrow
arrives with nothing to persuade
no arguments to make
sweet bourbon the only solace
cold water showers and palmetto bugs
leaving eggs in his mouth
The Atlantic Ocean had not been decisive
bouncing over the waves in transport
last girl's squeeze a song
hidden from the water thinking
of where his mother hid the silver
the solid gold chain she wore
entertaining guests with their lifeless murmurings
good times will return for us good people
she said preparing him for war
he wants that silver now he'll
turn his back on the prancing ocean
walk the soft sun-battered road to the city
trading salutes with the dinghy captains
the trumpet player the chronicler
wearing the new white shoes

John Riley is the founder and publisher of Morgan Reynolds, an educational publishing company. He has written over forty books of nonfiction for secondary level students. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Connotation Press, Right-Hand Pointing, St. Anne's Review, Dead Mule, and many other journals online and in print. 

Howie Good

Flash Bang Boom

With the encouragement of family and friends, I adopted a retired bomb-sniffing dog. I called him “Flash” – after the flashing lights of a migraine, I would joke to anyone who asked. One day he discovered under the couch the severed head of a doll I didn’t even know I had. Next the piano stopped making sounds when I sat down to play it. Then the tree outside my window appeared suspended like an astronaut in space. Now I often catch the dog lying on the couch studying me with cold, squinty eyes as if calculating exactly how much a person can bear.

Howie Good is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Steven Croft

Day One

After the roller-coaster dive out of the sky

I remember that step off the C-130 ramp, jogging

under generator lights, with the staccato of gunfire going

like a movie soundtrack:  Baghdad International Airport

Under Attack.  Waking, head on duffel bag, dawn’s

light painting the mud brick building beside me, the major

tells us thirty insurgents are dead just beyond

the building I’ve spent my first night against.  Soon after,

“prepare to move,” and we walk into this country,

the weight of a year in my chest.

KIA

“Sergeant Edwards is dead,”

As I awake before dawn, in the long tent’s double line of metal beds,

I hear two soldiers already up and in uniform say it, “Sergeant Edwards

is dead.”  I know it’s true.  He had just come to me to talk, but that

was before I slept.  I don’t want to rise up, dress, walk down as they

move along the aisle, to find the details.  And blessedly, in this moment

I cannot rise – my body won’t move.  Hours later, I read, “No Phones,

No Computers” posted as I walk into the empty MWR.  Under a string

of Christmas lights, three Marines play at a pool table by the empty

phone bank’s doorway, while somewhere across the world

men in uniform approach his wife.

War Enters Poetry

"Bullet,/ here is where the world ends, every time."

--Brian Turner

War enters poetry like Napoleon enters

a Russian ghost capital, the grand city

gutted by news of his coming, abandoned

buildings, shifting light of their burning

by passionate arsonists hung at street corners,

no one remaining to demand surrender of,

tribute from, hollow land where words

can paint a dark windstorm of bullets,

artillery's flashtube reveals of doom, name

the minefields of dying, all manners

of wounding, but its figures made lampblack,

no language can lift the dead city, war's

cancer on the world

An Army combat veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He has poems in Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, San Pedro River Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, Ariel Chart, Quaci Press Magazine, and other places.

Scott Ferry

Grammomancy: by writing individual letters

Letters, left alone, like bare numerals,
infarct, sew chords into themselves
as a symptom of hunger. No phone, no internet,
almost as tragic as no family. A sea squirt
can rewrite its entire body with just
a fragment of blood vessel, a long vowel,
maybe oo, or even oui. A Ouija board
only points to one letter at a time. Then it
becomes possible to piece together
meaning from a string of swift stops.
But I never ask the planchette
specifically when I will die. And I have
been warned to never touch the plastic disk alone.
They can take over. There have been
isolated instances of plates and shoes
streaking across rooms to strike doors.
Who are they? Are there theys watching
behind a screen for a single fingerpad to graze
the small sliding heart? And why would they
be honest with my future? Would they
see a slideshow of isolated strokes,
peppermint chocolate spilled on the cracked
dashboard, sunscreen smeared after the sand
snapped the vertebrae? Could they read aloud
my whole sentence, spelling out each
f a l l through the veil?


Labiomancy: by lips

My wife wakes at 5:15
and does not make any sound.
At 6:00 I feel the most delicate lips
on my forehead, the brush of air
made by enunciating a silent letter,
deliberately spoken. The kiss music-boxes
cinnamon from my shoulders,
to my intercostals, to the wrapped
bundles of cords and slender
channels of fluid, to the ends
of the articulating digits.
Even though I am not conscious,
I realize that this will be the
best moment of my day,
of any day.

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN. He has recent work in American Journal of Poetry, Misfit, Spillway, and Cultural Weekly. His second collection Mr. Rogers Kills Fruit Flies will be published by Main Street Rag in the Fall. More of his work can be found @ferrypoetry.com

Bart Solarczyk

Tami

Every inch a mile

& every clock eternity

I miss you, I stay drunk

I’m on my way. 

Three Months Now

The side of my neighbor’s house

looks like a yellow brick skull

with a green hedge beard

& dirty window eyes 

it watches past the driveway

watches me drink backyard beer

watches while I kiss 

the silver pipe

watches like it knows something 

I don’t but I do

gone three months now

she’s not coming back. 

Purple Hair & Podcasts

                       (for Ne’Cole)

Pain shapes our paths 

in ways

we’d rather not walk 

yet we arrive

voices breaking air

still sexy.

Bart Solarczyk lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his daughter, dog and cat. His poems have recently appeared in Big Hammer, The Razor’s Wine, Rasputin, Winedrunk Sidewalk and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He appears in G.A.S. #3, a Gypsy Art Show video that can be viewed on YouTube, reading five of his poems. His book Tilted World is available from Low Ghost Press and on Amazon. 

Matt Dennison

Ferlinghetti Spoke

Twenty years old,
sitting on the sidewalk
in front of City Lights Bookstore
after many days of Greyhound and train,
an oldish-even-then man in that beard and cap
said, "We don't open 'till ten," as he stepped past me
and closed the door. And I waited a while but eventually left.
What's a journey of two thousand miles when hunger is everywhere?

Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) His work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven and Jutta Pryor.

Mike James

Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet I, Erased

      sleeping hands

                                    which play

        for warmth

still

      among

            sleeping

                                  fragments

Ted Berrigan’s Sonnet II, Erased

  

              hello

     books

     the day is bright

 feminine

         the sun      up

                          late to work

                                        I should know better

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee and has published widely. His many poetry collections include: Red Dirt Souvenir Shop (Analog Submissions), Journeyman’s Suitcase (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review and currently serves as an associate editor of Unbroken. 

Gale Acuff

Discovered

I'm carving my initials on a tree

with a pocketknife my father gave me

yesterday. My first tool. My first weapon.

I'm leaving a hint of who I am here

by force. I'm not killing the tree but what

was that cry I just heard? Probably just

a bird but it's a new one on me. Crow?

Pigeon? No and no. GA--that's me, or

part. I know who I am but if someone

comes through these woods and doesn't know me then

he won't know I cut these clues. But he'll know

why, I suspect, and that's enough: as if

I've put my mark on Nature--my copy

-right. Yes (mean my initials), I own all

you survey. Not just this one tree but all

its brothers and, by extension, the earth

and sky, bushes and briars and flowers,

birds and squirrels and stray cats and dogs and

whatever other creatures wander through,

including the character who pauses

here and finds the owner of this forest.

Not that he would know where to look. Chances

are he won't stop here at all but at some

strange tree. If I'm discovered it will be

by accident. And I'm not even sure

if I can find this place again myself.

It will be like stumbling on a second

finding. I may wander through here for years

and never see me again, especially

if it's me I'm seeking. Then, in ten years,

say, I'm back in the territory and

I stop to wipe my brow or take a piss

and I look up and there I am, even

taller than I stand. Well (I'll say), I'll be

damned. There it is. There I am. After all

this time. I'll reach to touch the old scars and

recall the pocketknife lost long ago,

perhaps in these very woods. I don't know.

If it's here it's rusted to Hell by now,

going back to what it was before mined

and forged and alloyed and packaged and sold

to my father and then passed on to me.

That's me, too, lying in the loam somewhere

beneath the trees. I shouldn't be careless

and wouldn't want to lose me for life.

Or suppose someone finds it before me,

picks it up and takes it home and cleans it

and slides it into his pocket, finders

keepers? There's something left of me on edge

and I'll bet that it will never wear off

no matter how much it's used. My tool. My

weapon. My birth and my death and a name.

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in eleven countries and is the author of three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine.

Sarah Sarai

The Antichrist's Mad Skills
     on The Omen

Don’t lie to your wife, Gregory Peck.

That unholy son is a doozey.

Hormones are scheming delivery mechanisms of

the Devil and yet

Lee Remick is delivered.

To England!

Remind me, has the cake been served?

Nanny ties her noose for you!

Damien appears morally ambiguous.

Honors the

child-mother bond of comfort and hate,

tricycling Mom to hospital.

Photos. Mystery mark of death.

You got it, you goner.

Nanny murders.

Peck battles.

There is no happy ending unless

you favor fear, as I do.

That red-eyed coot

keeps me company most nights.

Sarah Sarai’s poems are in DMQ Review, Mom Egg, Zocalo Public Square, The Southampton Review and many other journals. Her second full-length collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven, was published by Kelsay Books. She doesn’t think clouds are lonely. 

Tim Suermondt

JOB HUNTING

I’m overqualified for this.

not qualified for that.

And when I inquire at the local

pizzeria the manager says,

“Tim, I can’t hire you. You’d

eat most of the pies before

anyone else could get a bite.”

I buy a small pepperoni pizza,

twirling the box over my head

in my apartment’s kitchen,

aping the way the old pizza makers

used to treat the precious dough.

The sun trickles through a light

rain, the first slice I take shines.

A PHOTO OF MY WIFE

WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER

You can detect the determination even then

and you swear you can hear her about to declare

“I love you, Hong Kong, but I’m leaving for good”—

her lips savoring the words she’s always wanted to say.

Unseen and a number of streets down on the right

her father is returning from work, stepping off the ferry,

passing the fishmongers clustered like star snappers

from one end of the pier to the other, a light rain sizzling

under the hot sun, and a number of streets down

on the left her mother is preparing supper, an egg dish

she’s made her own, a concoction the family loves.

My wife will swing her schoolbag, skip past the classic

buildings, the junk boats that will last only a few more

years and dream of her getaway on the dark, blue water.

Tim Suermondt is the author of five full-length collections of poems, the latest JOSEPHINE BAKER SWIMMING POOL from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, Gargoyle, On the Seawall, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Tobi Alfier

Litany

I am mercy’s wayward apprentice.
I am the dubious truant of grace.
I kneel at the Stations of the Cross,
then climb through the shreds of a fading downpour.
I am the late sun that flames through a window.
I am a cityscape of wind through the alleys.
I am a desert highway fringed by meadows
where fields and blossoms unfold into radiance.
I am a clock that needs to be wound.
I am a cello that plays in the evenings,
ushers in nightfall’s infallible silence,
and the sweet scent of creosote in the pitch dark.
I am a love you may almost remember,
your mind lazing loose in imaginary elsewheres.
There is no amnesty for ancient sorrows,
I am the galleon, sinking, still vanishing.

Winter Tourist

Once, in another winter, in a village
by a seaside with different accents
than mine, waves crash dark against
the shore and over the breakwater,
a woman in a red coat hurries through
her realm of kith and kin:

fishermen just docked—nets and boxes
brim with still moving catches for pubs
and homes, restaurants fine and common,
children walk to school with grannies,
their uniforms bolstered with hand—knit
scarves, hot bao from the Chinese bakery

in each pocket to warm their hands,
schoolwork in backpacks bear
the latest superhero and ballerina—
other women in bright coats with smoky
exhales bustle on their way to bank work
or as nurses at the clinic.

Wind carries the iron voice of cathedral bells
through the streets, an undertone
and melody for morning birds,
their sweetness drowned by crows
and seagulls, gangs protecting
territories, criminal versus delicate.

I am but a tourist here, brought by my love
of coastal roads, my curiosity of lives
touched by the sea, by the winter.
Laughter floats from half-shuttered
windows. Crimeless payphones ring.
I could’ve traveled half a year to find you.

Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. “Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies” was published by Cholla Needles Press. “Symmetry: earth and sky” was just published by Main Street Rag. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Kevin Ridgeway

The Last Time I Saw My Father's Face

My father

was bearded

and zoned out

on psychiatric medication

he could not pronounce

behind the glass from us

in county jail,

where he awaited trial.

He and my mother

argued over

why he did what he did

until he could only

slur insane gibberish. 

The guards treated us

so much like shit

we could still smell it

on the drive home,

when we both agreed

never to visit my father

in jail or prison again. 

Neither of my parents

were there when I got

locked up in the same

madhouse that swallowed

my father whole,

but it choked on me

and spit me out

in a demented miracle

no one prayed for but me.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including Grandma Goes to Rehab (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Trailer Park Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

Stephen J. Golds

4:48 In The Morning

R.I.P

Sarah Kane

It arrives

like a yellow taxi swerving into a parking lot with

warped flickers in the windshield.

An insect crawling mindlessly up a concrete wall with

five legs and the sixth dragging broken behind it.

The small stone trapped in between the tread on the

worn soles of sneakers that are too tight.

The clerk behind the counter of the liquor store

with the eyes like broken street lamps and a smile like a street fight.

The doctor in a Christmas sweater with

a handful of pills but a mouth with no answers.

An empty coat on a hanger hung in a darkened window in

the apartment building across the empty street.

A broken umbrella, it still seeps in, soaks and

dampens these fragile fabrics at 4:48 in the morning.

Stephen J. Golds was born in London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing and listening to old Soul LPs. Glamour Girl Gone his debut novel will be released by Close to The Bone Press January 29th, 2021. 

Chad Parenteau

Working Misanthrope Versus Pandemic

They stole my singularity.

Back to being among, not of.

I played. I lost. I want to leave.

No ball back. Home already here.

#meetoos #neveryous both

rejoice, tap on my glass bubble.

No more I-love-you-don't-touch-mes.

Hell is other people calling you back.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob's Tea House, What Rough Beast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule and Résonance. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. He has hosted the long-running Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston since 2004. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming. 

Susan Tepper

Drip

A drip from the eaves

into the gutter

has kept me awake

most of the night

it's been raining

my pillow is wet.

I dreamt Bobby Darin

came back after

forty years of silence.

What would Sandra Dee

do finding him jigging

to Mack the Knife

in her living room?

I miss you.

Even though we never had

a single intimate moment.

Would you notice

if I slipped away

quiet for

forty years.

Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her two most recent titles are CONFESS (poetry from Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and a road novel WHAT DRIVES MEN (Wilderness House Press, 2019) that was shortlisted at American Book Fest. Other honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Prize Nominations, a Pulitzer Nomination by Cervena Barva Press for the novel ‘What May Have Been’ (re-written for adaptation as a stage play to open in NY next year), shortlisted in Zoetrope Contest for the Novel (2003), NPR’s Selected Shorts for ‘Deer’ published in American Letters & Commentary (ed. Anna Rabinowitz), Second Place Winner in StorySouth Million Writers Award, Best of 17 Years of Vestal Review and more. Tepper is a native New Yorker. www.susantepper.com