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.