Jeff Weddle

I Loved Lucy

The grocery store
gave a dime apiece
for the pop bottles

I collected
by the side of the road,

righteous money,

but I kept one back
to hold the wild flowers.

The flowers,
a Snickers,
and a lame
knock-knock joke
went fine with the sunset.

Next day in school
you blushed
as we passed
in the hall.

James Croal Jackson

Thrift Store Sweater

Threads dangle off the sweater
I’ve worn forever, blue
and purple billows all across
my torso. I can’t just throw
away this salvaged dollar
from a Goodwill. A cloth
can sheath itself on the body
and glide forever, walking
toward an inevitable unknown
destination. The distance is empty
space, jammed with ubiquitous
sound. I will sew none of it.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022) and Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021). Recent poems are in Stirring, Vilas Avenue, and *82 Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Juliet Cook

Stalks

This abyss of dark corn fields
floods your brain and
nervous system with
violent effigies, waiting to abduct you.

Immerse you in flames
then just throw you away.
Your un-model hands shake
inside this pit of toxic abrasion.

Turbulent then blurring.
Trapped in the never ending
descent. Your spinal column
degenerates into a rotting corn stalk.

Unwanted. From a pall to appalling.

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of print and online publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including "Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails" (The Poet's Haven, 2019), "The Rabbits with Red Eyes" (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2020), "Histrionics Inside my Interior City" (part of Ghost City Press's Summer Micro-Chapbook Series, 2020), "red flames burning out" (Grey Book Press, April 2023) and "Contorted Doom Conveyor" (Gutter Snob Books, July 2023). Later this year, she has another new poetry chapbook manuscript, "Your Mouth is Moving Backwards", from Ethel Zine & Micro Press in October 2023. Cook's first full-length poetry book, “Horrific Confection", was published by BlazeVOX. Her most recent full-length poetry book, "Malformed Confetti" was published by Crisis Chronicles Press. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Max Heinegg

Wayfinder

In Reykjavik

The mother of the goldsmith shows me the rune
beside the protective eye of awe
near the lava stone & silver necklaces
adorned by the carved teeth of whales.

She says, Here is the wayfinder
& puts it on so I may imagine
how it will look on you.

Along the walls, she has modeled
her son’s creations. In black & white,
a grandmother, still beautiful.

I hope this is where we will follow,
the way an older culture set
the symbol to stay in one place,
offering
something of the earth
that skill shaped, clasped
with a magnet to hold the rope, so
you will know where you are going
even when you don’t.

Max Heinegg is a poet, singer-songwriter, recording artist, editor, and literary critic. His previous collection, Good Harbor, won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press. His second book of poems, Going Therre, came out in September 2023. Born in Cooperstown, NY, he lived in Schenectady, NY before moving to Medford, MA, where he has taught English in the Medford Public Schools for 25 years and is the co- founder and brewmaster of Medford Brewing Company. Connect with him on the web at www.maxheinegg.com

Al Ortolani

Stopped at the Gate

It is easy to forget we are fragile
without skullcaps, without sweaters,
without television to tell the stories
          that warm us.

In the snow I pee a sketch
like a boy. It is a refugee’s boat, medieval,
with a shallow prow, and beside
          the single mast

the dribble of all that can be saved
in a shipwreck. All that freezes
in deep cold. All that melts
          when it thaws.

There’s a rumor that Jesus
could walk on water, right through
these walls, your iron gate
          a mirage of fish.

Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, One Art Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, and many others. His most recent poetry collection is The Taco Boat, published by New York Quarterly Books in 2022. His first novel Bull in the Ring will soon be released by Meadowlark Books in Emporia, Kansas. He currently lives in the Kansas City area with his wife and brilliant dog, Stanley.

Tarnished, poem by Jon Bennett

 Tarnished 

 

You can replace things 

an alternator, a starter 

but the real skill is in diagnosis 

you have to keep learning 

have a passion for it 

I’m passionate about passion 

but don’t have much left 

I drink tea, play the guitar 

the chord progressions are different 

but somehow all the same 

the finger picking patterns 

never progressed 

At work it’s the same thing 

I know what I learned 

in the first two years 

but then seized up 

I’m rebar in concrete 

old silver fillings 

rigid, rusting 

and hampered  

by a fear of pain 

these scribbles of a staid teetotaler reflect 

“Today I brushed my teeth 

and lost a crown,” I write 

but there are many things 

in my mouth 

that will never come out. 

Jon Bennett writes and plays music in San Francisco. You can find more of his work here and here.  A collection of his poetry is available through Amazon at Leisure Town.

Back on the Job!

 It's been some time, and since we have a surplus of material on-hand, we will publish poems every Monday and Friday from now on. Please accept my apologies for the length of time it's taken us (me) to get things back in order.

Rusty

Charlie Brice

Immortality

You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts
every third or fourth morning,
cover those non-nut nuts with
blueberries because they have gobs
of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss
every other night to inhibit heart
infections, use mouthwash several
times-a-day to ward-off armies
of oral bacteria, walk the dog every
night for a mile, eat an orange daily,
take your Lipitor horse pill, your
Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi-
vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut
your Metoprolol in half and take it
for your arrythmias, and you do
all this instead of church, instead
of fingering rosary beads and
telling yourself that somewhere
near our galaxy’s big black hole
Jesus and Mary are floating
around without oxygen masks
or spacesuits, and it’s in this way
that you avoid the anvil of disease,
the miasma of malaise, the numinosity
of pneumonia—in this way you make
sure never to die, you make sure
to live forever and ever. Amen.

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022). His poetry has been nominated three times for both the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.

Dennis Mahagin

D’S BLUES

The backyard
was sun-kissed,
better than death.
a sun
kissed lawn always better
than death.
and he came back on the way
he had left.
He came back in a way

he had left.

It was hard, but the sun
was better
in this yard.
He came back, he came back
the way
he had left:to take
the Kiss
stay

away from death.

Dennis Mahagin is a writer from Washington state. Many of his poems have appeared online, and in print, via two published poetry collections: “Grand Mal,” and “Longshot & Ghazal,” Dennis also serves as the poetry editor for Frigg magazine.

Tohm Bakelas

something they call home

For a few hours, white snow
fell before nightfall; then rain
came and washed it all away.
The lone streetlight on this
dead end street, the one that
often makes the poems, makes
me think of Weldon Kees and
his porchlight coming on. My
neighbor, a miserable man who
never waves, whose name I will
never know, called the electric
company about the streetlight’s
stutter, about its blinking off
and on, from dusk to dawn.
They came and fixed it when I
was at work, when I wasn’t around.
And now, it’s just a well-lit beacon,
birthing brightness upon this street,
guiding lost souls, wet from rain,
towards something they call home.

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He has authored twenty-five chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning the Gutters of Hell (Zeitgeist Press, 2023). As editor of Between Shadows Press, he’s curated two editions of the notorious journal, “Haikus, Nearkus, Fauxkus, Fuckyous.”

Instagram: @flexyourhead

Charles Rammelkamp

 Doped with Religion, Sex and TV

“Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat.
“Pampered British rock star’s more like it.
He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,”
she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married.
She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.”

Darleen and I worked on the assembly line
at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs
into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes,
the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy
to take them away to the loading dock.

“I used to like some of them early songs.
‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’
but you can have this stuff. Working class hero!
Who does he think he’s kidding?”

I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon,
point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool,
the broken family, the absent sailor father;
mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism,
pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed

from generations of farmers on the prairie.

I was a college student, working part time 
while carrying a full course load.
She was a farmer’s wife, supplementing 
the household finances; in the same boat, really;
only difference was I read books and she didn’t.

What do they say? 
Never argue about religion, politics, or music.
“We got many more Plastic Ono Bands left to package?”

I asked, ignoring her diatribe.
I’d like to take a cigarette break.”

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also recently been published by BlazeVOX Books and a collection of flash fiction, Presto, has just been published by Bamboo Dart Press. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? will be published later this year by Kelsay Books.

Daniel Edward Moore

John 1:1

In the beginning was the word and the word was tired,
but even half-conscious I was seduced by
the slurred speech of the holy.

Oh, Christ the carbohydrate
chased by twelve shots of whiskey,
take me to thy church.

Be gone from my lips, oh, demon expresso,
oh, CPAP hose making love with my airway
to keep my oxygen happy.

If the word becomes flesh, something I can kiss,
with a glassblower’s flaming tongue,
summon me quick, so the dead in me

may rise from the heart’s silent ruins.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have appeared in Phoebe, Southern Humanities Review and others. His work is forthcoming in Action Spectacle Magazine, The Meadow Journal, The Chiron Review and Delta Poetry Review. His book, “Waxing the Dents,” from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Paul Ilechko

 Inheritance

A lack of paperwork
an emptiness of filing cabinets 
a distinct lack of manila envelopes

 
he was born unwanted 

learning at a pre-verbal age 
to tolerate the hot-potato shuffle 

his budget plywood crib
cheaply painted with angry rabbits
following him from house to house 

the aunt with oversized teeth 
would peer for a time 
from above a severe absence of chin 

and the very next day 
the hairless uncle who lacked even eyebrows 
would fail to appear surprised 

he didn’t care much where he went
as long as he was fed 
his taste in adults supremely inclusive 

but at some point in time 
the ball had to finally stop rolling 
and life then settled into an equilibrium

but everything now is upside down again
all interested parties reappearing 
as lawsuits drag anxiously on

an inheritance contested 
the entire clan eagerly awaits
to see how poor or rich he might be

and every last one of them
is prouder than they ever were before
to be recognized as his kith and kin.

Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, deLuge, Stirring, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.