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.

William Doreski

Tomatoes

Why were women called tomatoes
in the Thirties when depression
shrouded the rumpled continent?
We watch too many old movies,
their gray shades overlapping
and their dialogue too brittle

to ape in ordinary life.
The actors died so long ago
their photo-imagery has thinned
to one dimension, their contracts
expired in dusty sighs. Sporting
your tomato-red parka, you stalk

to the frozen river to watch
for eagles returning for spring.
Too early. The windy part of March
arrives tonight, banging trash cans
and snapping tree limbs to kill
the power and douse us in dark.

We might waste a day or two
with the generator whining
so loudly we can’t think aloud.
No one in old movies worries
about windstorms toppling trees
onto their sound-stage housing.

But in every film some chubby guy
in a bowler calls some woman
a tomato, and no one objects.
We wonder why that vinous fruit
rather than an orange, a squash,
a grape, apple, or cauliflower?

We don’t grow tomatoes anymore
because of the blight that rises
from the soil every year, a ghostly
infection that strips the plants
and leaves the bold fruit dangling
in a dismal world of decay.



Jardin des Plantes

Folded into an envelope,
you mailed yourself to Paris.
How lean you must have felt,

evading the global quarantine.
Roaming the fifth arrondissement
with your spider senses tingling,

you settle in the Jardin des Plantes
with croissant and a fistful
of latte to warm you while daylight

enrichens over limestone blocks
teeming with students too young
to have tasted the many pastels

painting you into this corner.
I’ll never hear from you again,
but expending yourself in books

in a language you’re just learning
numbed you to New York memories
perpendicular to everything

you believe about the course of life.
We couldn’t live together with
those verticals intersecting us

every time we stepped outside.
The restaurants swayed like shipwrecks.
The bookstores offered raw text

too dense for us to process.
No wonder you thinned to slip
between horizontal layers

and land with finances intact
in a far more flexible city.
Having finished your latte,

you roam among the Alpine plants,
a tangle of competing stems.
Already spring has so advanced

that pink and purple flowers
demand that you identify them.
You want to lie naked in the mat

of vegetation, but even
in Paris someone might notice,
and some officious gendarme

might refold and mail you back
to the city of shadows you left
to enjoy more primal dimensions.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021).  He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Mike James

In This Place

I expect the morning light to end.
And it does.
It does.

The sun reminds me which way is west.
One less thing to guess about.
Take me away from my plowed down routine
I’m mostly lost.

The dreams I wake with don’t stay close.
Last night I dreamed about walking among flowers.
This morning, one window frames the consolation of an empty field.

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. 

Mark Danowsky

Silent Howl

Night thoughts bleed
down my scalp
in all directions

Frozen seated in bed
eyes half open

The day's small sadnesses a blur—
the dagger reversed

Full moon on a lost holiday
I know this is just one version of me



Filter

I scan the headlines, not reading, not really
One finger touches a few boxes as a gesture of approval
Two fingers enlarge a Top 20 photo, I pause to spread the news
It's too hard to just listen to the radio, almost unscripted
I check the weather, standing in the yard while the dog wanders
Cooking, I picture the stack of books by my keyboard
A mental list of neglected songs begins to form
I put the book down to say I picked it up

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal. He is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press). His work has appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest, Cleaver Magazine, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, and elsewhere.

Dan Holt

Killing Rabbits

There was a cat in my neighborhood
that used to kill rabbits
The blood really stood out
against it's white fur

My father thought the cat
should leave the rabbits
for him to kill

The cat was just
trying to follow the food chain

We'd go hunting
and after my dad shot a rabbit
I would cut out its heart
and feed it to our dogs

And the blood
would really stand out
against my pale white skin

Dan Holt is blues singer/songwriter/recording artist, poet and fiction author from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. He has produced 11 albums of original music along with various singles and eps. Like most writers, his work has been published in various online and print journals. After many years away from the poetry scene, Dan has returned to writing poetry in 2021.

Lisa Creech Bledsoe

It's Spring So We're Both Amiable

Spiritual alchemy, I tell Crow.
That's what makes humans unique.
We can turn darkness into light.

The new ramps are like small rabbit ears
quivering everywhere in the greening slough,
making sharp alchemy of their own.

It's not the same, I say,
watching Crow sidewise while pulling
my boots out of sucking mud. That's
physical alchemy. Science.

Crow becomes shade, and is found by sun again.

We're tricky, I add. Just not uniquely so.
I'd swear Crow grins but
the truth is I'm being ignored.
Tolerated, so long as I don't pull any
loud blunders or stupid shit. Ha, I cackle,
as if I were prone to anything else.
Light into darkness on a regular schedule.

Still, that's spiritual alchemy
of a sort. Nothing Crow about that, though
it's true we're pinched from the same clay.

I've gleaned rock cress, toothwort, and waterleaf
for my bucket—they'll make a meal later in the day.
Mountain swamp vitamins, making me more mountain,
less mono-agriculture. I receive so much more
than I give.

Crow wings out of the slough toward the open field
in search of beetles, or late winterberries.
I wonder what Crow and I are becoming.

Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has poems in The Blue Mountain Review, American Writers Review, Sky Island Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Red Fez, and River Heron Review. She can be found at AppalachianGround.com

Steven Croft

Alapaha

When I take HWY 280 across South Georgia
to Birmingham, choosing its sometimes
lonely asphalt splitting forests of pine or farms
flush with crops over the monotony of interstate
and Atlanta's spaghetti interchanges, I make time
to leave this slower road, buttoned by small towns
of Main Streets, motels, and Dairy Queens, turn
further south, find the even slower roads
in the county of my grandfather's one room
schoolhouse where he sat for eleven years
and daydreamed of the river and pine woods
of quiet deer and turkey calls, sometimes a bear,
find the place he liked to go,behind the country
church on the, even now, dirt road, down the river
bluff in the rural place he was born into.

I park at the church where he pulled his pistol
on two angry roaming dogs, fired it into a tree,
only wanting to scare them he explained, would
only kill them if he had to: this lesson in spirits –
trees, animals, people, ancestors -- best taught,
felt, believed, here where hives of mosquitoes
float through twilight, where I walk the broken
clay road down to the river, where I wait for night
to shimmer moonlight on forever tea-dark waters,
mysterious waters, hedged by bald cypresses, wait
for whippoorwill's song, and my grandfather's
memory spirit-walks across where we would put
the boat in with its quiet electric motor, his memory
resting here in the waking night, heavy in my chest.

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 or the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.