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Showing posts from June, 2022

Karen Cline-Tardiff

  Friday Night I’m gonna smoke all your cigarettes,   Make you go crazy trying to   figure out if I’m really that girl   in the album liner notes   of your favorite band. You pour your beer in the trash,   refuse to drink the backwash.   But hell, it’s Friday night and   there’s more than leftover beer   in your future and mine. We think about fooling around,   but the couch is full   of passed out hippies and   covered in cigarette burns,   and shit, it isn’t even our house. I bum your last smoke   but your lighter is dead.    Kinda like tonight you joke   and I give you a pity laugh. Karen Cline-Tardiff has been writing as long as she could hold a pen. Her works have appeared in several anthologies and journals, both online and in print. She founded the Aransas County Poetry Society. She has a Kindle book of poetry, Stumbling to Breathe. She is Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Rebecca M. Ross

To The Thinking Camel Cricket That bent-legged audacity compelling your jumping cockeyed bravery to cross thresholds, climb silently through damp basement spaces to enter darkened dwellings only to receive a post-shriek boot to your humped back, a trigger-forced splash of spray, or a body glued immovable-- Once I understood your blind defenselessness, seemingly random leaps meant to terrify your own larger fears, my unease around you lessened Still, though take your crooked-bodied friends and get out of my house. Rebecca M. Ross is originally from Brooklyn but currently lives, hikes, and teaches in New York’s Hudson Valley. Rebecca’s writing has recently been published in Uppagus , Whimsical Poet , Streetcake Magazine , The Westchester Review , Soul-Lit, and Peeking Cat . She has poetry forthcoming or published in Last Leaves, Pif Magazine, and The Metaworker .

Brian Harman

To the Priest Who Stole the Eulogy I Wrote for My Uncle’s Funeral Standing, kneeling, sitting on repeat on a front row pew at a church in Riverside, California, with welled tears in my eyes after my heart was gutted the day before at my uncle's open casket viewing, I was in shock when I heard the priest plagiarize to family and friends in mourning, the eulogy I had written about my uncle, that I was about to deliver minutes later, that the church strangely requested I email to them earlier that morning, so they could get an idea of who my uncle was, which I blasphemously learned the real reason was so the priest could thieve my words, my sorrow, my full on sentences as if it was his own sermon, and when the priest stammered and ad libbed “Carlos loved Pepsi… Pepsi is life… ” I couldn't help but shake my head at the absurdity, and I looked around and saw my cousin did the same – yes, my uncle loved Pepsi, he drank a liter everyday wi