Mike James

 The River’s Architecture

for Louis McKee, d. 11/21/11

The river has a shape you follow with your

whole body: shoulder, footstep,

and ear-

those who know how to listen hear how

river wind is like breath, alive in lung and line.

Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has published over 20 collections and has served as visiting writer at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. His recent new and selected poems, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last collection, Back Alley Saints at the Tiki Bar, was published in April by Redhawk. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN.

Agnes Vojta

Tattoo

She stands like a statue, arm raised, her wrist
rests on top of her head as the artist draws
with black marker on her naked body.

The tree with the dragon will cover her side
from breast to hip. A friendly dragon,
she had insisted when they looked through the sketches.

The needles of the tattoo gun etch
art into her flank. She bites her lip. Closes
her eyes, thinks it will be beautiful.

Heart felt

I put the laundry in the dryer
and remember the day we strolled
through the town after lunch,
not ready to say goodbye.

The years of absence
had fallen away like dust
in a breeze. Confidences
came easy. We wandered

into a store that sold soaps
and wooden brushes. A glass jar
with felted dryer balls
stood on the windowsill. I told you

how the dogs had claimed
my old one as a toy. You picked
a ball with a rainbow heart
and bought it for me.

I watched your car disappear
down the road. We forgot
to take a picture. But I smile
and think of you when I open my dryer.

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams (Spartan Press). Most recently, she collaborated with eight other poets on the book Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (Cornerpost Press, 2022.) Agnes hosts the Poetry at the Pub reading series in Rolla and is associate editor of Thimble Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com.

John Tustin

Peppermint

I was walking the frozen food aisle and I saw her in front of me,
Loading up her cart with frozen dinners.
She was just the right height and not a tattoo in sight.
Dressed in a thin jacket, blue jeans and sneakers,
She turned and looked at me as I stood there
And she gave me a smile before going back to her business.
Her eyes were something else, as grandma used to say.

I imagined she was forty years old, probably had two kids in high school or college
And she divorced her husband because he was unfaithful.
I imagined she was alone most nights and she painted them away while drinking wine.
I began imagining a lot of things standing there
While she read the ingredients on a box of Stouffer’s Lasagna.

I finally turned my face away, put my head down
And walked right past her.
She wore size seven sneakers.
She smelled like peppermint.
I went to the next aisle and then the next
And then I paid the cashier.
I didn’t see her again.

When I got to my car I started to think about it
As I loaded the groceries into the back seat –
If she smelled like spearmint instead of peppermint
She just might’ve had me.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. His first poetry collection from Cajun Mutt Press is now available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6W2YZDP . fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

Chad Parenteau

Morning Talk

I dreamed of
a conversation

boring like
this one where

you failed
to convince

that I’m not
repeating mistakes.

Nothing learned.
No one changes.

Thank me
for listening.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, The Rye Whiskey Review, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine.

Ken Gosse

Happily Never After

His vow until death;
hers, until her final breath—
her mind not consigned
once something inside had died.
No, she hadn’t lied
but stopped trying to fake it,
which, for her, meant quit.
Not denying that’s a death,
both had bated breath.
Before either died they’d find,
since she had resigned,
they were no longer aligned.
She’d fulfilled her vow,
avowing the time was now
to make an ending
longed for long before sending
that shot through his head.
Though he ignored what she said,
the one became two
and though neither departed,
both broken-hearted,
their domicile now askew,
she ended their nights,
terminating all his rights.
His days in a daze;
hers, stuck with but not by him,
they lost to her whim.
Each now pondered, worse to worst,
whose death should be first?

Ken Gosse usually writes humorous, rhymed verse with traditional form and meter. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Writers Club, Pure Slush, and others. He and his wife were raised in the Chicago suburbs. Since then, they’ve lived in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Germany, and Virginia. Now retired, they’ve lived in Mesa, AZ, over 25 years, with rescue dogs and cats underfoot.

R. Gerry Fabian

Counterfeit Consequences

The voices always spew
the appropriate verbiage.
They encourage my participation
I make my tongue slow,
resistant and cautious.
I travel in their numbing rhizoids.
They shake my hand
with reptilian cold scales.
They grin with blinding white teeth
soaking in clotted blood
just below their gum line.
I am covertly calculating.
They instinctively
erase their enemies.

R. Gerry Fabian is a published poet and novelist. He has published four books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts and Wildflower Women as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound.

Timothy Gager

Into the Silent Sea

It’s so quiet down here, so quiet
you can’t hear the rage on the seawall

feel the twisting turn of your stomach,
the nervousness of nobody home.

The moon was not full today;
it was shaped like a heart

seen from the bottom. light diffracted
in a way that made you nauseous

spun down amongst lantern fish,
cookie cutter sharks

bristle mouths, anglers,
and viper fish, some sort of eelpout.

Nobody likes you, you say
to them, but you are here too,

like an incredible ship
sunken and abandoned.

Timothy Gager has published 18 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his latest novel, Joe the Salamander. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over 1000 works of fiction and poetry published, 17 nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio. In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 150 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager. He was the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Alison Miller

Going to the River with Quan

He leads me on his gold chain leash and yellow harness—butter
—limited edition.

At the end of the three tiers of stairs where I’ve stuck half a
dozen screaming stickers I nudge Quan to the right, away from
the spot where I once posed as a beaver in a calendar cover
photo shoot

which is on the way to the spot where I tried to watch the sun
rise on the foggy morning I met you

and wrote a poem about it—leftover flowers and trains

Quan and I walk past families trampling pine tags, post-
Christmas kids crying, that one slouched spot where I saw the
sun set with a weak-kissed boy,

down and around my hiking trails, and past the abandoned pump
house where my first boyfriend shaved between my legs with a
disposable razor

I put Quan in my backpack, zip him half way in and we descend
the corroded ladder to a pre-teen girl who says he’s cute.
Anonymous flying insects swarm a wall we have to graze to get
to where the rocks read FUCK TROY.

Alison Miller is a writer and sex educator whose poetry has been published in various literary magazines including Cultural Daily, Hobart Pulp, and Bareback Magazine. The owner of sex positive adult boutiques in Richmond, Virginia, she currently resides in San Diego. She is the editor-in-chief of Throats to the Sky Magazine. 

John Dorsey

Poem for the Original Pink Lady

somewhere you are frozen in time forever
thirty years old & resting your head
above a cincinnati pizza shop
even then you seem tired
or maybe bored
cutting your wrists on the couch
with a dull disposable razor blade
as if you were knitting a sweater for nick cave
out of empty mountain dew bottles & cigarette butts
proclaiming your love in an angry song
on the docks of billy childish’s broken heart

you dance like a little girl
hiding inside
a burning tire.

John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

DS Maolalai

America – what

a flight of strong beers
on this patio brewpub in Boston
a stroll from the hostel
where we drank until late-
night last night. America –

what unbelievable novelty!
and drinking again now
this morning to early afternoon!
there's a dog and some girls
and some guys around 40,
all decked out with beer-
guts like tires and sunglasses.
the air smells of sawdust
and no decoration;

that sought after bare-
walled industrial style. I love it;
this August, this sun
like a new polished
quarter. and that
is a novelty also –

being able to say things
like that. we have some
time to spend – we order
for some sandwiches,
eat them quite slowly. the bus
leaves for Salem at 3.
we are going; we intend
to see all America –
needing to see nothing else.

DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as "a cosmopolitan poet" and another as "prolific, bordering on incontinent". His work has nominated eleven times for Best of the Net, eight for the Pushcart Prize and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections; "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016), "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)

Anne Champion

Stigmata

I never predicted my hair would be in the fist
of a man who collected pieces of me as souvenirs,
had a shrine with my underwear, my childhood videos;

never thought I’d live in a sick man’s fantasy—
so real that he felt he had to kill it; never
imagined a stalker could be handsome,

could flinch guiltily when I argued
that parents did astonishing work fucking us up;
never envisioned a stranger could kidnap

an inner child so he becomes Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost; never prophesied
my wrists up, post-resurrection, bleeding

my shames, watching strangers recoil
as if before a witch.


Corpse Bride

In some places, girls are made to marry their rapists.
This used to strike me as barbaric, until
a man broke into my apartment and raped me.

I imagine our marriage bed the same way
a rash of suicidal thoughts migrate across my flesh
like a flock of crows. What difference would it make?

My bed is my coffin now; a corpse bride.
If another man were to ever reach for me,
my rapist will be there as maggots in my heart.

If I ever sleep next to a man again, my rapist
will be there as my trust clenched into a fist,
wondering if he’ll kill me in my sleep.

I’ve finally learned the secret to make a man happy:
die for his desire, keep breathing, and die again.

Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere.  She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.  

Robert Beveridge

Eight of Swords (reversed)

You know things have gotten bad when the local
prophets have taken off their sandwich boards,
stepped down from their soapboxes, and removed
themselves to your armpits. Hasn’t stopped them
from their attempts to spread the good word, though,
no sir. In the diner when you stop to avail yourself
of the ham and egg special, they proclaim the horrors
of parallel parking; when you pause on the path
in the middle of your jog, out they come to harangue
the passersby about the dangers of burglars who break
into homes, steal nothing, but leave Legos in your
hallways for you to tread on as you head to the bathroom
at three in the morning. You’ve consulted the authorities,
but of course, they say there’s nothing they can do.
None of this, you’ve found, is a huge deal until they
speechify in your ear. The laundry can wait one more day.
There’s just one more cookie, you can’t leave a whole box
with just one cookie in it. You have a spare room,
and the demons do need a place to stay, now don’t they?
You’ve always had compassion for the homeless.

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry on unceded Mingo land (Akron, OH). Recent/upcoming appearances in Raven Cage, Revolver, and Impspired, among others.

Jim Dunn

The Wanting Mare

Wanting more
The wanting mare
brings her furious desire
to the water’s edge
Waiting here
She dips herself in
Many moons of dusk
A sad star frozen
In the icy night
Sheds tears

One frozen moment
Stopped in its tracks
From the crescent
Of the other pink moon
Cassandra sings
Prophecies of
A watery wedding
Of one mermaid
To the endless sea
She twists like the tide
And rolls her soul
Out upon the rocks
In prayer

An offering to the
Crash of the collapsing surf
Rumbling roaring in a
Ballad of blue waves
She sings
Amongst the mists
Of the day
Soft sibilant and sweet
Entwined like a bird to its
Flight, a minstrel to his song.

Jim Dunn is the author of This Silence is a Junkyard(Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) Soft Launch (Bootstrap Press/Pressed Wafer, 2008), Convenient Hole (Pressed Wafer, 2004), and Insects In Sex (Fallen Angel Press, 1995).  His work has appeared in Castle Grayskull, Blazing Stadium, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Bright Pink Mosquito, The Process, eoagh, Gerry Mulligan, Cafe Review, Meanie, and the anthology tribute to John Wieners, The Blind See Only In This World. He edited the John Wieners Journal, A New Book From Rome with Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher of Bootstrap Press.

Jeffrey N. Johnson

Tramposo de Sevilla

Within white washed walls,
weathered stone and blue sky
the Gypsies arrived unseen.
I was green and little traveled,
planted on a bench with back turned,
abiding my time with Hemingway.
He approached with dirty bare feet
on herringbone brick and an open
linen blouse with little tears
in place of lost buttons.
His wedded his palms, held to heaven,
reminding me of our mutual friend,
and could I not share
a little of my good fortune?
He tightened and contorted his back
which would not work,
and gestured to his mate,
to misfortune and fate.
She sat nearby wailing,
swaying on hot stone,
her mosaic of rags flowing
with the four limp legs of her children,
starving, a boy and a girl,
one arched over each arm,
mouths open.
With Jake paused and Brett in mid-sentence
I shuttered and searched
and dug into myself,
putting pesetas into his palm,
wanting to return to my Fiesta.
He bowed in thanks
and limped away to beg
others of different tongues
before returning to his family.
With a bark of crisp dialect
the little ones sprang to life.
The boy wiped his nose
and the girl tugged her dress.
Mother gathered her rags and serenity,
giving each child a kiss.
Father hoisted the boy
to his sturdy shoulders
where he held on tight and starry eyed.
The little girl, walking on tip-toes,
pulled a flower from her pocket
and held it to the sun
as they disappeared
into the narrow streets.
A miracle to behold, I thought,
fingering my change,
or isn’t it pretty to think so?

Jeffrey N. Johnson’s poems have recently appeared in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Gargoyle, Midwest Quarterly, and Santa Clara Review. His story collection “Other Fine Gifts” won a regional Ippy Award, which included the Andrew Lytle Fiction Prize winner from The Sewanee Review, and his novel “The Hunger Artist” was a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award. His poetry film “One Old, One Young” has been an official selection in ten film festivals.

Jim Daniels

Half Days

My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself,
fought an unidentified infection in her spine
as it softened her discs into disappearance.

I’d unread that story if she were young and still
listened to lullabies. After she got discharged,
I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot

antibiotics into her port while she slept,
her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return
to school: half days—follow my dotted line

smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs—
at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway
rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity

of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk
of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring
at her friends as they strolled across the street

to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said,
embarrassed by illness like hard acne
or a blooming hickey, wrong music

or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school
jumper she no longer had to wear.
I was there to drive her to therapy.

They were teaching her to walk upright
again—forget stroll. My eyes clouded
with the toxic erasures of her MRI.

Was I staring at each teenager popping
the perfect gum of their bright young lives?
I’d have circled her bony wrists

with my tremble if she’d let me.
I shifted into drive. In the untranslatable
silence we shared, our breath in sync,

I pulled away, neither of us waving
to anyone.

Jim Daniels’ latest poetry collection, The Human Engine at Dawn, was published in December by Wolfson Press. The cover photo features his grandfather working on an engine at Packard Motor Car Company in Detroit. Forthcoming collections include The Luck of the Fall, fiction, Michigan State University Press, to be published later this year, and Comment Card, a chapbook of poems, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

Luke Johnson

The Swell, I Did Not Know

When I hit the hog
it ran a mile

through the thicket
and fell

in a foot of water
—drowned.

You hit it in the head
my daddy said,

the zombie effect. 
How the body

moves in death
                       a dance

and after
the dance

a knife
that grooves

                                    the bloated gut,
                                                                    gropes

like filthy men.
Believe me,

he continues:
even the innocent

eat, son,
throw themselves

                                          in acts
                                          of rage

and reach
for what the world

will offer them.
Later,

                                  the fire
                                  leaps

like magic
from his

fingers and a full
bottle

                              passed
                              like prayer.

I pretend to sip.
Spit to ward

the spirit, divination.
A warmth

the body
turns

                              to torment,
                              visions. My

daddy in the dark
wood

     asking where his
brother is

and why the lake
won’t cough him

                                back.
                                   The babies?

He cut
them clean.

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Frontier, Cortland Review and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can connect on Twitter at @Lukesrant.  

Ted Jackins

After David Berman

Your acerbic wit,
Gift for tragic
Wordplay,
And lazy croon
Belied a broken heart,
One you shaped
To fit the frame
Of the country song,
Until eventually
It all became too much,
Your words whittled down
To razor sharp
Turns of phrase,
Your heart exposed
Wounds and all,
Suicide notes
In miniature,
And by the time
People took notice
You were gone

Ted Jackins is a poet and musician from North Carolina. Their work has previously appeared in Red Fez, Outlaw poetry, Museum of Poetry and Big Hammer. They are also the author of both Psych Ward Blues and Mercury, In Retrospect, both available via Alien Buddha Press.

Paul Corman-Roberts

As Below, So Above

Heaven is a perv wishing
they too could squeal the
immaculate carnal joy release

the stellar high-country shuffle
coiling on sweet tar puppets say
we’ve been rehearsing
this pratfall for eons

& so, they leak
returned souls through
every half-assed vortex
sloughing over our deserts

Don’t kid yourself about
the one-way street afterlife
ain’t what it used to be
so below, as above

You see it wasn’t
merely the fabric of the walls
we tore apart when
we nuked the pearly gates

they are coming for us
the minions of a dominion
we dragged to the strip club
and god was never the same.

Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press (2021) and most recently the graphic chapbook The Sincere from Libran Apocaplyse Books (2022.) An original founder and current organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival (Summer Beast 2022 - Beast Crawl Literary Festival)  he currently teaches  workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab, the SF Creative Writing Institute and the Oakland Unified School District. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service and the Poznansky Sisters, but mostly he is just exhausted. 

Laura Cherry

Faults

Sense of smell gone, most of the time, except
on days of a particular grace or drug.
One bum ear, constructed from scraps
like a clay ashtray. Lungs that suddenly fill
and close, except when sighing their great sweetness,
your astonishing gift.

Waking before dawn. A certain restlessness. A certain
propulsion. A hunger. Casting this way and that.
Even now, a wolfishness under the skin.
After the mammalian tears, the clear eye
of the lizard, the skittering limbs
and shed tail.

That head of hair, your breathless corona,
shedding silver. Those devil-like brows.
Hands strong and rough. All the pleasing parts
of you brought to please, as to a banquet
in a dream where I cannot eat so much as
a single bite.

The bright kind of dark. Eyes like clouds
sweeping in over mountains. Now I see:
I was only imagining the long spillway,
the rush to beautiful nowhere, the hidden fault
where the earth might split and we'd take hands
and dive in.

Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooksTwo White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press) with Robert Hartwell Fiske, and her work has been published in journals including The Glacier, Ekphrastic Review, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, and DMQ Review. She earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She works as a technical writer and lives near Boston.

F. John Sharp

Coronary on Aisle Six

The EMT’s made great time
when minutes count, the vise
in my chest stretching seconds
to eons, my will rewritten
in my head on the floor
of the WalMart, next to the socks.

Then: electrodes, calm
reassurances that don’t
reassure, an IV, oxygen
in a mask that doesn’t hide
my face from voyeuristic
shoppers and clerks on a Saturday.

A gurney ride past the cashier
(I never got my socks) and out
the door, eyes following. I know what
everyone will be talking about at dinner.
A secret little part of me wishes
that would happen every day

F. John Sharp lives and works in Northeast Ohio. He is the fiction editor for Right Hand Pointing, and selected published works live at FJohnSharp.com. 

Gerry LaFemina

Post Card to Charles Wright from a Recording Studio in Bristol, Virginia

Charles, today in the birthplace of country music I recorded guttural rock & roll, then crossed the double yellow line on the main drag to enter Tennessee. Then back again. How easy to move between two states. Like the drop in your low rider line: both break and continuation. Like light: both wave and particle, even as it wanes in the dwarf orchard at dusk, reducing the corporeal world to shadow. How often have I oscillated between grief and joy, how readily one becomes the other. This is why I love the prose poem. There’s hunger’s pangs and the pleasure of anticipation, too. I went for dinner in a dive bar where Hank Williams stopped the night his heart surprised him with its final struck chord, a D minor, dissonant with only a bit of twang. He hadn’t eaten there, but let me tell you, the hamburgers were to die for.


Postcard to Jan Beatty from the CSX Rail Depot, Cumberland, Maryland

Dear Jan, I’m thinking of you on a train across Canada and of my earliest memory—the rattle and racket of the elevated F line out my window in Brooklyn, how that rhythm pulled me into dreams I can’t remember. The voice of my nightmares remains the screech of steel wheel brakes. What do we do with the blurry faces of absent fathers, the various ways they can be unknown? What do we do with the sparks sent flying so they seem to burn within us? What do we do with the fact that we all may be clown babies? The conductor as he passes counting passengers could be a lost relative he looks so familiar, after all. Or is this a lie we tell ourselves. Out here, the boxcars are being pushed together to make new trains from old. The way the cars hitch together like words or friendships. I used to walk with my son along the freight line that ran through our backyard in Michigan, the tracks another mad river of steel and speed: look in either direction and it was heading away, past the horizon, to whatever next town awaited.

Gerry LaFemina’s most recent books are The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (creative nonfiction) and Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (prose poems). A new collection of poems, After the War for Independence, will come out later this year.  A noted arts activist who has served on the Board of Directors of the AWP and edited numerous literary journals and anthologies, LaFemina founded the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is a Professor of English, serves as a Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University, and is a current Fulbright Specialist in Writing, Literature, and American Culture. In his “off” time he is the principal songwriter and front man for western Maryland original rockers, The Downstrokes.

M. J. Arcangelini

Sunset In Chicago

February, 4:30 PM, the sun slants sharp
through the large, streaked,
boarding gate windows at O’Hare airport.
Waiting for a flight home and for the
sun to leave the sky around
the same time, both of us heading west.
The sun will sink beneath
the broad tarmac of landing strips,
turning everything between us
into silhouettes casting shadows.

Stuck in the airport waiting for a plane
which keeps moving further away,
taking-off later and later, hours
delayed, allowing me to pound
away laboriously at the keys of my laptop
trying to wring poetry
from the commonplace,
pull profundity
out of mere inconvenience.
Yawning into the glare of the
setting sun.

M.J.  Arcangelini, born in Pennsylvania in 1952, has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in little magazines, online journals (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, As It Ought To Be Magazine, and The Rye Whisky Review), & over a dozen anthologies.  He is the author of 6 published collections, the most recent of which is PAWNING MY SINS, 2022 (Luchador Press).

Alexis Rhone Fancher

Tonight I will Dream of Anjelica, My First Ex-Girlfriend, Who Taught Me The Rules Of The Road ...

Anjelica comes on to me like a man, all slim-hipped swagger,
relentless, dangling
that red, ‘57 T-Bird at me like dessert. Lemme take you for a
ride, chica, she sez
after acting class. I figure what’s the harm, but Ms Angel Food
gets out of hand. I
don’t count on her heart-shaped ass, or those brown nipples
crammed in my mouth.
I don’t count on the Dial-O Matic four-way, power leather seats,
the telescoping
steering wheel, or the frantic pleasure of her face between my
thighs. I admit, I’ve
always been driven to sin. But Anjelica’s far from blameless.
She rides me hard,
week after week, double clutches me into ecstasy, hipbone
against hipbone, the
dulcet, lingering groan of our gears, grinding. When I confess
the affair to my
boyfriend he jacks himself off in the galley kitchen, comes all
over his unattainable
fantasies. He says he doesn’t consider sex between women to be
cheating, and begs
me to set up a threesome. I tell him the T-Bird’s a two-seater,
and watch his face fall.
I could end it, but why? All I can say is, I want her for myself.
All I can say is, I’m a
die-hard romantic. Anyone I do, I do for love.

©Alexis Rhone Fancher. First published in The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, 2015

Alexis Rhone Fancher is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s authored nine poetry collections, including; DUETS (Small Harbor), and EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQBooks). BRAZEN, again from NYQ Books, published in March of 2023. Alexis lives in Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She has a spectacular view. Find her @:www.alexisrhonefancher.com

David Centorbi

Barbed Laughter

Barbed laughter from a night
of bitter parades:
the holy left hanging held in no palms,
genuflections to thorned spittled hearts.
You heard the tears
as they rolled
down my cheek,
jaundice and frantic.

***

In what nightmare will you sleep next
turning children’s eyes into cringing stones,
their tongues into lonely red carpets?

I asked you to pour your pleadings on the wind
and scatter their rusty tears up to the sun–
light of future cold
and will-less destruction.

***

You stood over
the stillpain on the altar–cries long lost,
forgotten curled fingers–
and caressed the smiles of lies,
stroked the silky manes of illusion.
There was a fire there
that had never breathed or eaten.
Its orange lips cracked, the valleys
holding pails of dizzy dying lovers.

And you kept singing:

Until the end of time,
Blood, forgiveness, and laughter
Will be mine.

David Calogero Centorbi is writing and working in Detroit, MI. He is the author of  Landscapes of You and Me, (AlienBuddha press.) AFTER FALLING INTO DISARRAY (Daily Drunk Press) He can be found here on Twitter: @DavidCaCentorbi. Blog: davidcentorbi.blogspot.com

Scott Ferry

sparkle

there was a time when i wouldn’t notice the flash and weft of sun on water / back when i didn’t need to notice god in the wind / back when i didn’t need tangible evidence / back when i could just be unholy walking with the thunder and the broken psalms // but now i know i am broken and faithless / now i must collect each strand of light as it falls and weave it into my splayed chest / a threaded rosary keeping all the brightness in my blood / i must do this because i have to laugh with my children / because i have to show them there is music on the black waters / that there are sapphires on all of the graves

sin

i am falling asleep without my cpap / the middle of my body keeps opening until the feeling of being without a shell becomes soothing / the blood as a mist the bones crackling into a fine chalk / the presence inside of me now something singing / the words now a sloping breeze over the bed / but when i try to fly up the charcoal castles and canyons i fall jagged back into an asphyxiation / a seatbelt stinging sharply against my clavicle / a blush of epinephrine / i am alive again and the first thing i feel is shame

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His latest book is a collaboration with Lillian Necakov and Lauren Scharhag titled Midnight Glossolalia from Meat For Tea Press. He also has a collaboration titled Fill Me With Birds with Daniel McGinn looking for a home. More of his work can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

Bart Solarczyk

Shaking Sticks

Today a happy dog
bouncing in the yard
won’t allow me
to consider
suicide or murder

the sky’s a cliché blue
& it’s warm for November
shaking sticks
she wants to play
why not?

Even Light

Sunbeams warm the room
but skunk my bottled beer

everything, even light
has a downside.

Bart Solarczyk is a lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, PA. Over the past forty years his poems have been published in print & online in a variety of magazines, journals, anthologies, broadsides & chapbooks. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including his most recent book, Carried Where We Go, available from Redhawk Publications & on Amazon.

  

Rusty Reviews: Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, by Amber Decker

Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief

Amber Decker

• $8.99
• 62 pages

Folkways Press

2022

I've followed Amber Decker and her poetry for some time now with respect and admiration. Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, is a smartly produced 4-by-6 perfect-bound chapbook from Folkways Press, which  reads as well as it looks.

Take as an example the poem "Coal Miner's Daughter," a dangerous title with all of its cultural associations. Decker uses them to full advantage, the details of mystery beginning to coalesce and eventually blossom from the initial lines excerpted below to the in the final two lines of the poem: "the crooked gravestones/of every small-town churchyard."

I am a lover of all the dark places

the headlights of my car can never touch.

My empty womb is jealous

of the warm orchards

where the black-eyed children

of Appalachia gather at night

to pick apples

with their skeletal fingers

by the light of the moon.

These lines, fecund with possibility, highlight a collection rich in detail and a lyrical expression for which many poets would extract their eyeteeth. Toward the end of the book, in "Elegy,"  the narrative opens with "grief knocking/at the doorways of my eyes," and whose "bones [are] busy trying to climb out of my skin." There's a texture of felt-life detail here that both impress and express, shock and awe,  in demotic lyrics that go forthrightly from a female persona and assail with words an imagined world, resolving it in twice earned–at least– emotion. This is a fine chapbook, in short.

Jason Ryberg

Evening Birds

With the sunset comes
the first of the evening
birds, with their glassy

eyes and piercing blue
notes, bragging about all their
women in the dark

places of our quaint
little neighborhood, the sun
now nothing but a

residue of pink
and gold on the horizon,
and the stars just now

focusing all their
distant gazes upon us
from places that some

scientists say are
now just giant holes in space,
that lead somewhere else.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. 

Gloria Mindock

Bucha

A tragedy
The sky turned red
Blood
The Russian soldiers fed

With force, with guns
A village now hostage
They rounded up who they could
Pulling them out of their houses
Hands tied behind backs

Screams, shots, rape, brutality
Families watched their loved ones
Murdered

HORROR

The world cries with hearts broken
But does not help
Sends weapons only
Making victims of all of us

Souls of the deceased will never rest
Until freedom is achieved
The broken land rejoined

Standing with Ukraine
The colors of your flag raised
Blend in with the sky
Sunflowers wilted
But soon will bloom
As evil is defeated

Bucha, we love you

Gloria Mindock is editor of Červená Barva Press. She is the author of 6 poetry collections, and 3 chapbooks. Her poems have been published and translated into eleven languages. Her recent book is ASH (Glass Lyre Press, 2021) won 7 book awards and was translated into Serbian by Milutin Durickovic and published by Alma Press. Her new book, “Grief Touched the Sky at Night” is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018. www.gloriamindock.com

Jason Baldinger

a bed of dead lizards

hear that gravel bellied song
that gravel bellied reply
these birds foreign to me flash
flickers of color unrecognized

shelled by a walnut tree
I sit on match sticks, splinters
cows low at that side of the road
sun hasn’t broke the ridgeline
soon heat will reach dangerous

I’ve memorized this same sky
deep in the wings of night
when the only sounds
are cricket’s legs
and the slow burn of stars

as night stretches
time is once again
valueless

it's past time to shelter
crawl into a bed of dead lizards
let the swamp cooler
take the sting
out of that thermometer

or see if the tire patch
will handle this sticky tarmac
through one armadillo towns
complete with headless bears
and collapsed eaves

in a roadhouse
I order a gallon of sweet tea
a platter of catfish
let the air conditioner be my spine

if luck holds
beyond mark twain
or the mississippi
then it's keokuk
the sixty-one highway
disappears
the ghosts of iowa
eccentric as howard hughes

Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA.  He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, as well as two ekphrastic collaborations (with Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) are forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster. His etsy shop can be found under the tag la belle riviere.

Chandra Alderman

Mountain Ash

Outside the snow thick as fog.
A mountain ash in the distance.
Its branches shaking from the wind
and robins feeding on the berries.
Crimson beads falling on snow.
I think of your back,
as we stand in the shower
after untangling from the sheets.
Everything reminds me of you.
A snow plow passes by,
robins scatter, autumn leaves
caught in an updraft.
They vanish in the snow.
I close my eyes and blush
remembering our warm bodies,
damp from the shower,
lightly touching on the bed
by the window.


Stanley Kubrick

I’m driving home
lowering sun over my left shoulder.
It casts shadows of the bare trees,
guitar strings pulled taut
across the road. The rhythm of the car
moving over the shadows
takes me back to your attic.
We are piled on blankets, holding each other,
listening to Stanley Kubrick by Mogwai.
It might have been the drugs
or your gentle hands but every note
whispers love in my ear. These moments,
they come and find me, even in this desolate
salt-crusted winter landscape. The orange
lowering sun, the trees’ shadows
playing a song just for me.

Chandra Alderman lives in Northeast Ohio where she writes mostly letters and sometimes poetry. She is often seen out in the wild with a camera, spying on nature, everyday life, and writers. Her photography has been featured on chapbooks published by Nightballet Press and Crisis Chronicles Press, and also online at Thirteen Myna Birds, The City Poetry and The Octopus Review. Her poetry has appeared in Trailer Park Quarterly. More than all of this, she is trying to compose the perfect bowl of soup.

Ken Gosse

Petered Out

In Neverland, they say the story’s true
that Tink became outraged and very vexed
when Peter whispered to a boy named Sue,
“Can’t tell one fairy tail from the next.”

Admittedly, the joke was very crass
but told as they were exiting the can.
She overheard and soon would kick his ass
from Netherlands, a consequential ban.

Clap all you want, poor Pete cannot return
to southern comforts of her promised land.
He took with him a lesson hard to learn.
No fairy tale—he’s permanently banned.

A pirate now, whose bitterness belays,
he’ll hook and heave each ho, for false love weighs.

Ken Gosse usually writes humorous, rhymed verse with traditional form and meter. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Writers Club, Pure Slush, and others. He and his wife were raised in the Chicago suburbs. Since then, they’ve lived in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Germany, and Virginia. Now retired, they’ve lived in Mesa, AZ, over 25 years, with rescue dogs and cats underfoot.

John Tustin

My Day

I was at a diner and after I affirmed my order
I saw from the corner of my eye
Something on the floor
To the right of my booth.

It seemed someone
Shit their pants and it fell loose
Over and over again
As they were on their way
To the shitter

And it was a trail Hansel and Gretel
Could easily follow,
Right down the center.

I saw the quick movements of the manager
And the hurried movements of the employees
To rectify this moment, this movement,
As the smell began to come to me
And I couldn’t help but begin to notice
What had happened.

I licked my fingers and put them to my nose
And then the coffee came
And I smelled that deep and true
And then they cleaned up the mess
Made by some poor soul in what is most certainly
In worse a state than me

And then all I smelled was disinfectant
And bacon
As I ate my omelet and my toast
And my bacon.
I had two cups of coffee,

Stood up, paid the bill at the register,
Walked back and left a two dollar tip.

This was the second best and the second worst part of my day.
The worst was not much worse
And the better just better marginally.

I would put myself in the majority class.
Nothing gets much better
Or worse.

Now you know.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.