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