Live Nude Poems

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

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.

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

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. 

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