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 with extra ice
to the very top, yes, Pepsi was a big part
of his life, but I wouldn't go so far as to say
it was life itself, unless I worked for
Pepsi or I was in a Pepsi commercial –
and my family sat sadly bewildered as
the priest made up some other random facts
about my uncle, the only consolation,
I guess it broke the ice of heavy hearts
hanging in the air, but still, what the fuck
happened to the sacred covenant, oh
father of snakes and bullshit, the eighth
commandment, Thou shall not steal,
you holy fucker.

Brian Harman is a poet living in Southern California. He received his MFA in creative writing from Cal State University, Long Beach. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Misfit Magazine, Nerve Cowboy, and elsewhere. He is the author of Suddenly, All Hell Broke Loose!!! (Picture Show Press). He loves craft beer, creating music playlists, and writing poetry into the night.