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.