Dennis Mahagin

Deer Lodge

And I’m grateful
for that autumn morning
you helped me out
at the dump: it was so cold
I couldn’t feel my fingers
or my toes! Yet
you hopped right in
the truck bed, trampling the slick black bags
of trash; you kicked the shit out of the tail gate,
you kicked
the fuck
out of of the two by fours, right there where the sun had a name
for the coming hail
it despised, and it was bent nails, and friend,
spent
oil and
rust; my mom had just died
and the season was far
too far and long
gone. Another Eddy Money song
came on the radio; I turned it up
to ten again. I was strung out on
pills, and kept a couple always melded
between the cotton tongue and the roof
of the mouth.
Smiling sideways
at me making the best of things
behind my wheel, you tapped
on the back window when the wind
came up— a sneaking hunch
or sucker punch
one can only feel, a harbinger, oil-soaked floorboards
or anybody’s bullshit
getting old.
Love buzzed
through my pores, but I kept it inside. I was stuck
in first, requiring proof.
Those days, oh Lord I will remember them
tinged by the scent
of fir needles, frost
and Pennzoil; on the way home, you said,“everybody feels it
sometime, pop it out of four wheel, why dontcha?”
… Some kid running the yellow loader
over the front gate you used to know.
And I’m grateful
you never called me
out, only ripped the fingers
of those work gloves well
away, one by one
with your beautiful teeth— guiding me
toward the hill and gone
from there, I dry-swallowed two
pills, opened the passenger door
and let you back
inside. I tried
to sing yet could only
shout,
“I GOT TWO TICKETS TO PARADISE…
PACK YOUR BAGS WE’LL LEAVE TONIGHT!!”
Rolled down
the window and spat out
my grief.

Ghazal

Outcomes forever unrevealed. Air bus, or thunder? Hopeless fucking drag race
of the mind. Drop a tablecloth from the rooftop. Thoughts in a hail of gravel.

Life, folks unavoidably has got no plot. Growing old, as coffee in a tall
cup goes cold. Why follow Z? Everybody gets a snoot full, and wings it.

Haul the generator down by the sea. A five piece band is playing Frampton
covers. All those boys need is a crackling tall bonfire. Moonlight. Fans. Electricity.

One of those joints where you need reservations, sadly, she said; in a manner
of speaking, Earth. Ties are also required since we are always out of time.

A low murmur, alternating drone, came from the adjoining room. Might make it
out. Go on. Press your ear to the wall. patient with cell phone, quietly—recovering.

She was mostly interested in the milliseconds of respite. Hung The Scream by
Edvard Munch between two landings in a boardroom. Her compassion, meteoric.

Dennis Mahagin is a musician and poet from Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the author of two poetry collections: “ Grand Mal” from Rebel Satori Press, and “Longshot & Ghazal” from Mojave River Press. DENNIS is also the Poetry Editor for Frigg Magazine.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Circle K Vapers

3 men and 1 woman.
Standing right in the doorway.

These Circle K vapers.
Shooting smoke signals into the scandalous
pot shot air.

One foot on the bumper curbing
in the parking lot.

Customers trying to shoulder past.
A face full of smoke for their troubles.

Each time the attendant knocks on the glass
brings a fresh round of laughter.

The metal garbage can overturned
so that the guts of the world
spill out.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, Live Nude Poems, The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Kim Malinowski

Comets

Pretend we are strangers sharing patchwork blankets on a frozen field. That we aren’t staring at each other’s irises and counting freckles, your wild mane combed by my hand—the conservatory open and winds smelling of frigid freedom and the marvels of darkness where only red lights are allowed. Pretend our lips don’t meet—that you don’t cry out as the first comet streaks. Pretend that awe is for me. Let me capture that shriek of wonder—the darkness, Orion making his trip, and the deep freeze. Pretend with me.

Ode of Oath

I would protect you from everything
if I could—even the sunbeams
you flinch from—
rays you guide me away from.
I would steal your shade,
my hand across your five o’clock shadow
and hush you.
Steal away the smoldering
or give you cause to.

Let me protect myself—even if you think it’s silly.
That is how you can love me.
I will lullaby you into history,
our hands clasping, damp, flinging.
Neither of us are ordinary—we’ll never be boring, huh?
And as you simper and hedge around questions.
I will learn the language of broad shoulders,
the pulsing near collarbone.
Your tension and release.

Love,
May I call you that?
Even if we are not together.
I will make you laugh,
bring down the moon,
dive into my own nervousness.
I will fret. I will knock.
Then bang.
Kick sideways—until you open yourself
and you can courtesy, all ladylike.
And let you cry
into my breasts.
Let you let go
of your terror,
all those unknowns that haunt you—
all the beliefs
about what men are.
I will clutch tight your secrets
as you return upright.
I will dab at your eyelashes.
I will protect you from anything.
Especially yourself.

Kim Malinowski is a lover of words. Her collection Home was published by Kelsay Books and her chapbook Death: A Love Story was published by Flutter Press. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Mookychick, War, Literature, and the Arts, BLUEPEPPER, Enchanted Conversation, and others. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.

Mark Danowsky

Affirmations & Last Rites

They say Patience is a virtue
It gets harder every day

I stay down with my demons
No one knows me better

I speak to lost souls
Not just just on dark nights

I don’t dance with demons
Because I cannot dance with sincerity

Tell me what you think about fate
And I’ll tell you to listen to your body

All this talk about mind-body connection
As if there is no danger in it

We pat ourselves on the back
For self-awareness of a self we don’t believe in

I want to paint or pick up an instrument
To speak foreign languages

The next word is not better
It is simply next

I’m sticking around for what’s next
Since my body tells me there’s time

Another tragedy in losing yourself all wrong
Is the money you left on the table

Please don’t let yourself go
Even if you burn all the bridges first

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal, Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, and a Regular Contributor for Versification. He is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press) and JAWN forthcoming from Moonstone Press. Some of his more recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Bluepepper, The Broadkill Review, Eunoia Review, FEED, Muddy River Poetry Review, The New Verse News, Otoliths, Philadelphia Stories, Remington Review, Sledgehammer and Vita Brevis.

Charles Rammelkamp

Hide and Seek

“A brother was a terrible thing. He was a lifelong competitor, yet you couldn’t hate him without hating yourself.” - Ian Rankin, Hide and Seek

Whew. That was just a dream,
just another regret-fueled dream,
my parents and brothers long dead.
I hadn’t run away from them, after all,
hadn’t gotten lost trying to return,
running down deadends,
lost in places
unfamiliar as dreams themselves,
groping, time running out
the way it does in dreams,
almost tangible,
fragile and fleeting as sleep itself.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife Abby. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip and The Compulsive Reader. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published in 2021 by Clare Songbirds Publishing and another, Sparring Partners, by Moonstone Press. A full-length collection, The Field of Happiness, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.

M.J. Arcangelini

At Raquette Lake (1973)
For Bette

Fireworks seemed like a great idea to
Celebrate our new-found friendship;
The 20 year old hitchhiker and
The middle-aged birthday girl.
She had some stashed at the cabin.
The moon disassembled and reassembled
Itself on the surface of the lake as we
Approached with the recovered fireworks
And the remaining half of a half-gallon of vodka.
She lit the wicks in turn and then jumped back.
There was the sizzle, then the fizzle as
Each one hissed at our disappointment.
We left them, useless, near the dock, and set out
To peek into the windows of
Unoccupied neighboring cabins
To critique their interior design.
The bottle going back and forth,
While we passed the cool night with
Gossip, giggles, and secrets revealed.
As morning eased into the landscape
The lake emitted a blanketing mist which
Crawled across the yards, a persistent
Nudge sending us at last to our separate beds.

M.J. Arcangelini (b.1952) has resided in northern California since 1979. His work has been published in print magazines, online journals, (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, As It Ought To Be) & over a dozen anthologies.  The most recent of his five collections are: “What the Night Keeps,” (2019) Stubborn Mule Press and “A Quiet Ghost,” (2020) Luchador Press. 

C.W. Blackwell

Wharf Lights

This evening starts without fanfare.
A sheet metal sky invents us in a

palette of gray-blues and muted greens
as if we inhabit rooms full of cigar smoke.

Couples on benches sit stenciled against
the bay, their stillness is a photograph

mounted and hung in a glass frame.
The wind blows half-smoked cigarettes

between the wharf boards, a woman
catches them, stumbling in the tide—

her eyes have no color, teeth like
faded tungsten. Even the lit cherry

flares like a scene in a Billy Wilder flick:
a hot and colorless fleck in the shadows.

The scene turns. Now wharf lights go
flickering down the platform in a panoply

of blue electric arcs. Sea lions bark in
the cross-piles and octopuses whipsaw

from their depths. Our eyes blink in
sapphire codes, the lights invent us anew.

It is what we’ve been longing for: to
wake in bluish colors and drink and

laugh and screw in that neo-noir glow
beneath a blanket in the still-warm sand.

C.W. Blackwell is an American crime fiction author and poet. His poetry has recently appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Versification, The Five-Two, Punk Noir, and Dead Fern Press. His upcoming poetry collection, River Street Rhapsody, will appear in Spring 2022 from Dead Fern Press.

Howie Good

Pertaining to Darkness

If I look back, I see snakes and coffins, and if I look ahead, I feel myself walking on corpses instead of on the ground. There are deserts where there once were oceans, the stench of gasworks where there once were visions. Come night, shadows have sharp teeth and retractable claws and creep toward me without making a sound. I have slept for one-third of my life, and when I’m awake, I experience time as illegible colors or as thoughts I wish I never had.

&

Used paper face masks litter the ground. How’s that allowed? Even the crows on the wire must be wondering what the fuck. A series of incidents doesn’t necessarily add up to a plot. I want to shake this person and that person and tell them, “You can’t be lost in your own world all the time.”

&

I was sitting up in bed reading a book called People Love Dead Jews when I came across a passage quoted from the memoir of a Jewish sonderkommando. His responsibilities at Auschwitz concentration camp included disentangling the naked corpses lying in heaps in the gas chambers and carting them to the ovens for cremation. Although hair caught fire first, he notes with scientific dispassion, it was the head that took the longest to burn.

Howie Good is the author of Gunmetal Sky, a 2021 poetry collection from Thirty West Publishing.

Yuan Changming

Last Meet with My First Love: for Yi Ming

meeting you face to face
you seem to hide yourself
behind a fog in another world

separated by the pacific in between
you often look like the flower
blooming on my window ledge

have a blue dream
and you will see a little cloud
drifting around like me
near that borderline
I have packed you up tightly
into my backpack, the luggage
I cannot consign, or sent by mail
but carry it with me
close to my chest

you are neither light
nor heavy, but you will
occupy a solid space
in the closet of my heart

Yuan Changming, with Allen Yuan, runs poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. (poetry subs are welcome year round). Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1,869 others worldwide. Recently, Yuan published his eleventh chapbook Limerence, and served on the jury for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards (poetry category).

Steven Croft

All Hallows' Eve

Sky fades over distant dark forest,
chaff of wheat blowing tans and darker browns
across a frosty, fallow field
where the promise of green growth
once lived in the spell of earth moist and soft
where spring seeds once opened
like a heart on fire with love.

Now oil lanterns glow
through the old-field schoolhouse windows
as autumn's twilight vanishes to dark.
Children appear in the door to follow
their teacher past the sparks of a bonfire,
just lit by a father, to neighboring homesteads.
Their eyes candles of expectation,
the night sky cold, full of stars.

An Army veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Live Nude Poems, Quaci Press Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ariel Chart, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Chad Parenteau

Cambridge Doesn't
Need Another Poet

Camo facemask
clashes with brick
red sidewalk.

Must have been
picked off
from afar.

Summer solace
in burger joint
once regulared

by my former
worst enemy
in letters.

Revolutionaries
spin before
first doctrine,

helicopter
parent
positions,

roundhouse
even right
thinkers.

Spheres spin
off, unable to
influence selves.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Ibbetson Street, Off The Coast, Nixes Mate Review and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

John Tustin

The Crow Funeral

If you see one in progress
as you’re passing by,
stop and take off your hat
to honor the crow funeral.
Unlike the rabbits or the trout,
the crows hold funerals
for their fallen.
Not to mourn
but to warn their brethren
that this, too, could happen to them.
Come look! Come see
how your brother or sister
has come to their end.

Their caws not the wails of grief
aimed at the heavens
of which they have no concept
but a call to the others
to come and see what is horribly possible
and maybe to gather a posse
that will enact revenge on a perpetrator.
They know of no afterlife,
only today and tomorrow
so danger cannot exist to them
beyond what they have seen.

They accept you there,
seeing your manner and expression
and knowing you mean no harm.
As they gather
not one of them thinks,
“I’m glad it’s not me”
but instead cries out to the others,
“Be careful. This could happen to you.”
They ruffle their wings in unison
and you stand there awed,
knowing that in the moment
they are naturally better than you.

if you see the crow funeral,
give respect
but don’t dare dishonor them
with something so useless
as a prayer.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

Jeff Weddle

Only for Jill

Always, I try to write the poem
with the secret
and fail
the poem which will reveal itself
only to you
and bring you elated
to tell me that you have found
that mystery
you are certain
but I fail and the mystery
remains unknown
though, darling, that is why
every wrong word I write
is yours
filled with error, yes,
but stumbling along with love

Jeff Weddle is the author of several poetry collections and one collection of short fiction, as well as the Welty Prize winning Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press. He is associate professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. 

Rob Plath

the dark core of everything

as a boy
i remember
watching
my mother
peel potatoes
w/ a knife
the way she
held the blade
the way her thin
wrist turned
& how she took
just the right
amount of flesh off
& dug out
spots of rot
saving the most
pathetic potatoes
& how clean
they all looked
in the colander
beneath the faucet
& then decades later
i remember
how she got sick
but still insisted
on cooking
& burned a pot
on the stove
after she passed
out on the floor
in the den
& how i wished
it was simple
that i could’ve
taken a knife
shaved away
the tumor
cut out all
of those terrible
multiplying
dark eyes
until everything
was clean again

rob plath writes like a velociraptor is behind his back. he loves cats & the moon. find more of his work at robplath.com 

Agnes Vojta

Fall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

It is the season of apples, crisp and tart. I transform them into crumbles, pies, and    comfort. They soften, lose their texture, sink into sugary union with the flour.

September lifts the hazy skies of Missouri summer. Contours become clearer. The woods fill with yellow wildflowers; the species are easy to confuse. Does it matter for a poem whether this is  an ashy sunflower or a tickseed coreopsis?

Confusion is easier than clarity. The second law of thermodynamics requires natureto fall from
order into disorder. Atomic arrangements disintegrate. Ink dropped into a glass of water
disperses, forms a cloud, spreads until the liquid is pale blue. Bubbles burst, unable to sustain surface tension. Organisms die.

Autumn is the season of disordering. Of decay. Leaves fall; highly organized matter turns to soil.
Returns to soil. Death is but an increase in entropy. If you look at it like that, there is nothing to fear.

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019) and The Eden of Perhaps (Spartan Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines. Her website is agnesvojta.com, and her facebook page is @AgnesVojtaPoetry.

Max Heinegg

Sisyphus

Poets can't get enough of the boulder.
Camus, who may as well have been
a poet, said he loved that man
in the frozen multiverse can choose
to assert private meaning & justify the absurdity
of existence, laughing back at the deathless
gods, a savory bit of payback.
My students call him Syphilis.
Stop. I say, You're ruining the mood.

Back to the rock: Gluck’s icy, but she rolls it
easily. Homer’s is for Ajax to hurl, a ton weight.
A millstone only Apollo can save Hector from,
for now. I draw mine in dry erase on the wall
by the window. Erudite vandalism? More
small crimes for daily inspiration! Thinking
less of Camus than reading D’aulaires, laughing
when I read the husband/wife team wrote of the wily
king on his return to the beloved, Fooled him again!

Anything to be alive! To bask in the climb
like Alex Honnold on the staggering face
of El Capitan, smiling, granite-minded, all
long handed limberness. Utterly prepared
for the fabulous labor of his scaling.
Or in the TV Avatar, the blind earth-bender Toph,
the teacher who listens & waits, staring down the muscle-
bound Boulder, who learns a sexist is a Pebble!
Or you, my braver, showing me the mundane is not

that every day. To notice the position of the rock,
how it’s emblem also. To mark,
by contrast, the cloud-cover shadowing
it, our grit influencing the ground's give. Our days
spent hovering over what will be
our grave & time. To be taught a better attitude,
a wiser manner to manage a grief perpetual,
to wield this terrakinesis! To never tire
of the flesh, until it tires of us.

Max Heinegg lives and teaches in Medford, MA. He is the author of Good Harbor, forthcoming spring 2022, which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, The Cortland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Nimrod, among others. His new record of poetry adaptations will arrive in late 2021, and his previous solo records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com

Steven Croft

9 / 12

After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons,
the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names
of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that
swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns
and muted cities, tv screens blink images
against our staring eyes.

At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN,
fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up,
rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen
scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering
city predicting our future.

"100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass
the parade field, sunset making a shadow over
ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named
for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety
can be counted, the months of it limited by news
we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet.

Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen
yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our
deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beauty
wounded nightly by an observance of mortar shells.

An Army veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Live Nude Poems, Quaci Press Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ariel Chart, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. 

Howie Good

Street of Tears

There was a man dragging a grand piano containing a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments down the street, and a woman poking a severed hand with a cane. Black ants emerged from a hole in the palm of the hand. I wished Baudelaire was alive to see it. Any time now I'm leaving for ... I don't know where. Baudelaire fled to Brussels to escape his creditors in France. Meanwhile, advanced syphilis was devastating his brain. He could only speak in disconnected words and phrases that might have been mistaken for poetry.

Howie Good is the author of Gunmetal Sky, a 2021 poetry collection from Thirty West Publishing.

Mike James

Memorial Day

Some weeks seemed to be
More nights than days
Maybe darkness was just a hangover

So many things you could mimic
With your voice

Owls and crickets thought you kin

How did that all start?

One thing happens
Something else

Then you chop up a picnic table
To burn in the backyard

You bet on how long certain embers will stay hot
You talk about the driveway letter you will write with fresh ash

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His many poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) He has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations.

M.J. Arcangelini

His Fringe Jacket (1972)

He figured he was at least
half in love with her, most likely
the half usually labeled lust.
He was so in love with her
that he gave her his tan leather
jacket with the long fringe.
He wore that jacket everywhere,
even when the Ohio summer was
too hot and humid for leather.
He liked the way it made him feel,
the weight of it, the way he imagined
he looked wearing it at a rock concert.
So when he gave it to her, because
she told him how much she liked it,
it was like giving her a dozen roses and
a 2 pound box of Whitman chocolates.
She liked it so much that she
took it with her when she moved to
the West Coast with her boyfriend.
After she left he appeared diminished.
In Oregon she soon tired of the jacket,
which never really fit her right, and
gave it to someone she'd just met.

M.J. Arcangelini (b.1952) has resided in northern California since 1979. His work has been published in print magazines, online journals, (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, As It Ought To Be) & over a dozen anthologies.  The most recent of his five collections are: “What the Night Keeps,” (2019) Stubborn Mule Press and “A Quiet Ghost,” (2020) Luchador Press. 

David Cranmer

Blue

Man, head in his lap, outside my hotel
window, healing in the Denver sun.
Oblivious, as life bores around him,
he frequently scratches both arms.
I don’t get his poison, I’m a whiskey drinker
myself, but I get blown apart.

Pouring morning coffee, I keep an eye
out, making sure no one flips him for
his sneakers, watch, or a few bucks.
As a security officer, paranoia is my
natural state, the dull cloak I wear.
He’s zeroing out as I’m ironing a shirt.

By the designer threads he’s wearing,
I’m guessing it’s heroin. His spiral may
have him on meth, but his face doesn’t
look all that fucked up yet.
When he lifts his head, he reminds me
of a younger and ultra-slim Warren Oates.

Three quarters of an hour pass and
Slim finally traipses off, I assume to the room
where I’ve seen him go a handful
of times before. Soon after, I head to
my gig off Inverness West. Guarding an
empty office of universal grey and beige.

The sun that peeled the toxins from
Slim’s skin pours in the window down
the wall and onto the floor, stretching
shadows across the room onto my
shoes. I type words into my iPhone,
capturing the poetry of a slow death.

Cranmer is the editor of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and whose own body of work has appeared in such diverse publications as The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly, Punk Noir Magazine, LitReactor, Macmillan’s Criminal Element, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. Under the pen name Edward A. Grainger he created the Cash Laramie western series. He's a dedicated Whovian who enjoys jazz and backgammon. He can be found in scenic upstate New York where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Brian Glaser

Perseverance

        -for Seamus Heaney

The sky, where we could not ever live
in the sea of the past,

now we are on an island there,
and everything has changed,

the name of God
in the swell,

in the foreign atmosphere,
the final spring of the sun.

Brian Glaser has published three books of poems, including Contradictions with Shanti Arts in 2020. He has also published more than twenty essays on poetry. He works as associate professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California. Twitter: @blendedbrian.

Catherine Zickgraf

Five-Thirty

When brakes all light up at red lights,
most drivers seem to go for their phones
and scroll to touch the outside world,
while some just get lost in their palms.

The impulse to scan the devices in hand
just fills the moment with foolishness—
for where the mind makes its residence,
there the heart will also live.

Watch sunset sky spread dusk above us
in fire-winged shadows of dying day.
See the tidal blues wash up the horizon
as night is reflected in oceans of space.

Here under the city’s blessing of stars,
I’m headed to get my son from practice.
I cap my pen when the light turns green—
excited to show him the seed of this poem.

Two lifetimes ago, Catherine performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press. Find her on twitter @czickgraf. Watch and read more at www.caththegreat.blogspot.com 

 

Frederick Pollack

Collapse of the Wave Function

I’ve redone my forties
more times than I can count.
The latest version ended abruptly,
down on the beach when some visiting
oligarchs shot each other
and witnesses. But usually I’m safe,
there or on my balcony with my drink.
The abs and springy hurtless hips
derive from reps and runs I spent
my twenties and thirties on, which no doubt bored
me crazy but I did them. The money came
apparently from two meretricious novels
that metastasized into film. I try not

to think about them. I think about
my look. Half-awake, slightly stupid,
bad but not mean and, of course, hot;
when I walk the beach I’m like, if you get me,
a vacuum cleaner … This coast is immune
to pregnancy, emotion, STDs
and cellulite, and I’ve stayed here the last several
brief lives. I think about the novel,
how a saleable plot is like a tectonic plate,
forever inching toward disaster.
I think about poetry, an ancient world
without geologic activity, orange sun –
how could it still have mountains? Why is there life?

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press), and two collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals.

Kenneth Pobo

Raylene Means Well

Her pillow is
ringing bells.
She can't sleep.
Several cathedrals
pound in her ears.
It must mean
something,
a new beginning,
a truth that breaks
out, sets a fire.

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections.  Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

Ace Boggess

The E is for Existential

Coyote crossed cliff's edge,
didn't drop before pause to diagnose
as though he must scent gravity
to be bound by it: the in-itself/for-itself
falling: later, coyote-shaped crater in painted mud.
Coyote would rise again to replicate his misadventures:
blown up, face smashed against
the blunt-pawed portrait of a tunnel.
How foolish one acts when starving,
helpless beside this blistering highway
somewhere between birth & Albuquerque

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, J Journal, Harvard Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Juanita Rey

Lilapsophobia

A storm's moving in.
Please take care of me.

According to the weather forecast,
it will be as primal, as swirling,

as a Caribbean la tormenta.
Protect me from lightning strikes,

cacophonous thunder rolls.
I am embarrassed to admit it

but I am in abject fear.
You only know me as

the vivalavirgen,
the unserious Latina.

But the air is about to spin
in some violent vortex,

bluster wildly,
whip and shatter.

Look at me. My face is as pale
as brown ever gets.

My eyes crunch together
so I can"t see what I'm thinking.

My hands tremble. Knees thump together.
You ask "Is anything the matter?"

If you don't take care of me
then you're the matter.



You're Late

Mosquitoes save me
from impatience.
I’m swatting

one after the other.
And a motorcycle
roars down the street,

cutting the air in two.
My attention thanks
that machine tenfold.

I’m tolerant
at least for as long as
my neighbor’s dog

sidles up for a pat.
And those insects return,
more desirous of my blood

than you are of my
good favor, apparently.
You should be here by now.

Luckily, sunset is.
And so’s the blue jay
peppering the sky

with screeches.
It’s six o’clock and all of these
are willing to spend

the moment with me,
even the bright yellow tulips,
the young boys playing basketball,

and the mosquitoes
I thwack when they land on my arm.
You must have a better place to be.

I’ve only this one.
You’d be surprised
who appreciates that.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

Robert Beveridge

Queen of Pentacles

The bar is only less than dim
when the door opens, just before dusk
and she enters, metal box strapped
to her back, as it has been
every afternoon, she tells me,
for the past fifty-one years.
A dollar a tamale, six for five
and she hasn’t raised her prices
since the day Newt Gingrich
signed the Contract with America.

I’ve never been a fan of that texture,
the mix of sand and dough, a filling
that never has enough spice to balance,
but I know I’ll have to drive in eight
or nine hours, and this well bourbon
isn’t gonna absorb itself, so five bucks
later there’s a bamboo leaf in front of me,
six tamales still cornhusked across it.

I finish my drink, stick another five
in the mouth for a refill, pull out
my pocketknife. The tie falls away
like the alcohol-aided hours of wait
between the time you get to the bar
and the time the show’s supposed to start
(an entirely different increment
than that between the time the show
is supposed to start and the time
the show begins). She
had completed her rounds,
walked straighter as she opened
the door again to almost full dark
and the clamor of bands unloading
trailers outside. My red

fingers unrolled the first
tamale, and after another
half-cup of Kentucky courage
bit into it, the chile-tomato kick
giving way to velvet through
the mantle to a core
of ground beef, fire, and sunset.

There is nothing, it turns out,
that pairs with a perfect tamale
as well as well-ridden Kentucky oak,
and for the next ten minutes,
instead of a sweaty, dim bar
in Chicago, I sat
in a cantina on a border
that doesn’t exist
with a pile of napkins
that appeared with my last
drink and five more
homemade tamales, spicy fingers,
and no chance to thank
this new patron saint
who lifted the scales from my eyes.

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Page and Spine, The Pointed Circle, and Failed Haiku, among others.

Scott Ferry

april 15th

and the moon is waxing
but that doesn’t matter

what does matter is that my daughter
comes out to look at the sky

with me says there you are
when she spies me down by the garden

where we see the last membrane of light
wrap the lips of the distant olympics

she doesn’t stay long i don’t either
sometimes the eternal does not need

much time to wash our fluttering eyelids—
our metronome valves swishing

oceanthick with as much blood
as we can swallow

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His third book of poetry, These Hands of Myrrh, is upcoming from Kelsay Books. You can find more of his work at ferrypoetry.com.

Louis Faber

Moses Says to Aaron

We sat in the tent
and you complained again
of our condition, knowing
wht lies just out of reach.
He speaks to me, not you
and there is little you can do
to hide your jealousy.
I often wonder what might
have happened if I had wiped
the blood of the lamb from your lintel.
It was you who watched
the calf take shape and
did nothing, seeing it
a personal tribute, and
ordained its fashion
and for your sin
we shall be together
forgotten men
in the land of Moab.

Louis Faber’s work has previously appeared in The Poet (UK), Bengalurur Review (India),, Dreich (Scotland), The Alchemy Spoon (UK), Atlanta Review, New Feathers Anthology, Arena Magazine (Ausralia), Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, Greens Magazine, The Amethyst Review, Afterthoughts, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, and in small journals in India, Pakistan, China and Japan, among many others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He, his wife and cat reside in Port St. Lucie, Florida

Brian Jerrold Koester

Baby Pink Roses

the aroma of remote times
tiny pink roses climb deformed
I'm acquainted enough with death
not to fall apart when roses die

tiny pink roses climb deformed
into Mom and Dad's bedroom window
Mom and Dad fall apart when they see roses
and the dog is wicked because Mom said so

shouted in her bedroom window
I can't play make believe right or sleep right
and the dog is wicked too because Mom said so
and they say I'm the crazy one

I can't walk right or smile right
not the corrosive blood of Jesus, not desperate prayers
can save me from the crazy ones
no escape unless you live long enough to grow up

from sudden blood and empty prayers
I am too acquainted with death
and growing up has not helped me escape
from the aroma of remote times



A Penny

When you're broken like me
you can't hear the meadowlarks sparkle
or feel the poppies glow

I can't stop the dogs
that drink blood from my wrists

I dreamed I had a penny
to exchange for life or death
and I didn't know which to buy

I dreamed I wore a golden veil

When I came to the temple
my head was already there
outside on a stake

Brian Jerrold Koester is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net Anthology nominee. His collection is titled What Keeps Me Awake (Silver Bow Publishing) and his chapbook is called Bossa Nova (River Glass Books). His work has appeared in Agni, Streetlight Magazine, Delmarva Review, Right Hand Pointing, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and has been a freelance cellist.

Ann Leamon

Houses

Caretaking this multi-million-dollar home
once mine, now under contract to someone
else, empty, echoing, dining table bearing
a plastic orchid, a drop of beet juice.

A single fat ruby
on the kitchen tile.
And pouring in from memory—
menstrual blood.

How fast you forget the cycle, the constant
awareness, surprises, always late in a suburb
with no stores and your last tampon in the other bag,
hot stickiness between your legs and an important meeting
the next day. Every woman has that story. Just ask.

With age, I thought it would subside. Instead
in a last convulsive gasp, my body lost
all decorum, no longer predictable, abandoned
to hormones, raging against the changes.

Unexpected deluges of thick heavy red
fluid, ropy clots, cramps, doubling over
while walking the dog, invisible teeth
chewing my insides. Finally

the doctor asked if I had any questions,
and I confessed. He said, “Oh, we can fix that.”
And my God, he could, easy, quick,
and my world opened up, welcoming.

Freeing me from the strange house I was living in.

Ann Leamon holds two diametrically opposed master's degrees - one in Economics from the University of Montana and one in Poetry from Bennington Writing Seminars. The hopscotch of poetry continuously surprises her. 

William L. Ramsey

Digressions on Water

1. Workers have arrived to protect my house
                against damage that could potentially
                develop from excessive groundwater.

2. Water is elemental in the old
                sense, not like helium or barium,
                but elemental like fire, wind, what
                not. That is high-grade psychological
                uranium. You know as well as I.
                Powerful because it grew up with us,
                losing its tail along with us. Because
                it is conceptual rather than mere
                primordial matter. It left traces
                of its DNA in our dreams: sea, flood,
                wave, reflected terror, drowning panic,
                striving to come up for breath within it,
                waking when we can’t. All this even though
                we no longer interbreed. At least not
                in ways that result in fertile offspring.
                Offspring capable of producing
                virile offspring in turn, not water mules.

3. Few people wake up screaming about rain,
                the sound of it streaming down the roof tiles
                into gutters. No-one wakes up screaming
                about water sluicing into downspouts,
                about water trickling down windowpanes.
                It is more apt to be the swelling mass
                of water that haunts us, the swelling mass
                of water rising up from under us,
                entering all rooms, repeating old vows.

4. In the crawl-space under my house, workers
                are installing a “vapor barrier.”
                There is a loud thump on the floor under
                my chair, and a worker quickly shouts “Fuck!”
                It protects me from intrusive moisture,
                protects the understructure of the house.
                But I am going upstairs just to be safe.

5. When my parents’ basement flooded, I was
                the one shouting, thumping under the floor.

Ironing boards, stuffed animals, tax returns,
                receipts, stockings, an old brown recliner
                a mouse had nested in, engineering
                books, the art-deco metal waste-paper
                basket that sat by my parents’ bed through
                the nineteen-sixties, seventies, eighties,
                and nineties, and which may have presided
                over my own conception, certainly
                my sister’s, toys, particle board, yearbooks,
                tools, products new in package, the package
                water-logged and moldy, Archie comics.

My eighty year old mother stood by her
                bedroom window in a nightgown, not right
                in front of the window, off to one side.
                She peered around the edge of the framing
                like a gunfighter in the Wild West, pinned
                down in a hotel or saloon, watching
                me toss it all on a vast dripping heap,
                then she would duck back and cover her eyes.

An old aquarium, get this, transformed
                into a lone oasis of dryness:
                the medieval arch the fish once swam through,
                plastic seaweed, all bone dry. Moses style.

But the ruined thing that really got me
                was a little Christmas chime: a fragile,
                cheap, overly complex, ridiculous
                contraption given to my mom by her
                older sister Anne back in, roughly, nineteen-
                seventy-seven. And I, dutiful
                son and capable sophomore in High School,
                was made responsible for assembling

                this hideous thing with dozens of brass
                angels blowing little brass trumpets from
                which dangled little brass chains with brass rods
                attached. I hooked all this to a brass disk
                that I balanced on a pin that I perched
                on a candle-stick holder with a bell
                soldered to each side. The whole family
                gathered around to witness the holy
                miracle of this thing balanced and spinning,
                driven by the heat of the lit candle,
                to hear the holy miracle of each
                brass angel dinging the bell with the rod
                that dangled from the chain from its trumpet.

I shoveled all of these pieces on the heap.
                I will not write down what species of thing
                issues from the matrimonial bliss
                of brass angels and water, what dangles,
                what sounds it produces, what hope it has
                to balance with like abominations.

William L. Ramsey’s first book of poetry, Dilemmas, is available from Clemson University Press. His poems have appeared over the last 30 years in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry.

Thomas Zimmerman

The Last Word

The turkey bolognese is cooked, just needs
reheating: much like me. I’ve cut my world
to bite-sized chunks and hashed the other parts
so smooth that I can try them with a spoon.

Beethoven’s Third, with Otto Klemperer,
my favorite, conducting, blares bright from
the speaker, grabs my spirit by its frayed
lapels, and shakes the bullshit out. Almost.

There’s often just a little despot left,
Napoleon on Elba. Teacher, poet,
brother, husband: fetishes I relish,

though I sometimes lack my mother’s cast-iron
stomach for. I’m sixty-one: prime number,
hardly prime of life. Oh, Tom. Relax.

Thomas Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Grand Little Things, Sledgehammer, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. Tom's website: https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/

Dan Provost

Gazebo

One tender moment with her.
A bow—a dance,
quiet reflection
and atonement
for despair
never understood.



That Was That

--As quick as beauty entered,

she left.

Her obedience was
conquered with his

quick nod and
solid
tongue.

A former collegiate Offensive Lineman and Football Coach for 26 years, Dan Provost's words have been published in numerous print and online magazines.  His next book, Darting In and Out--will be released later this year by Kung Fu Treachery Press.  He has read his works throughout the United States and is a two time nominee for the the Best of the Web award.  He lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura, and dog Bella.