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