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).