Paul Ilechko

Blood Blossoms

What kind of blooms are these
which linger into early winter

survive so many nights
of freezing temperature

still thriving in their brilliant scarlet
above the mahogany flame

of a stained wood deck
the first time we’ve had this

variety in their hanging baskets
I see them through

the splintering louvers
of the wooden blinds

and wonder if they will
survive into another year

*

from out of the kitchen
I hear a scream

where Linda is thinly slicing
cucumbers with the mandolin

a bunch of begonias spraying
from the wound

frozen into physical blossoms
arranged with careful greenery

displayed against
the sheen of a pewter vase

a silvering of slippery ice.

Paul Ilechko is the author of “Post Moby” (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026) and “Fragmentation and Volta” (Gnashing Teeth, 2025). His work has also appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, Bear Review, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Laurel Review. He reads for Marrow Magazine

Jim Zola

Jesus Saves

The Indian market
and the gun shop
share a wall,
as if each were waiting
for the other
to explain itself.

Beyond the last houses,
the fields begin,
plowed under
for whatever comes next.

On the poles,
the signs

JESUS SAVES.

Someone
climbed there.

Perhaps he worked
after midnight,
hammer in one hand,
sign in the other,
stopping whenever
a car approached,
slipping back
into darkness.

I imagine him
moving
from pole to pole,
leaving behind
the same promise
again and again.

Waiting
for the sentence
to outlive
the man
who nailed it there.

Scott Ferry

7.

the black bird is on the sign
then it isn't

the sign still rocks as
proof

memory is silver chalk
identity a shrinking list

i am a thing reclaimed
from a box of scissor and song—

my self a dark wing
flashing

in the afternoon
lull.

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He has two books birthing in 2026: Blood on the Map of Man from Luchador Press and Inheritance of Air with Aakriti Kuntal from Meat For Tea Press. More can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

Jake Sheff

(originally published by Synchronized Chaos)

Blackguarding Merles

You mock a dahlia’s faith in rain
And March’s hieratic pain
In Wotan’s one good eye. I show
The only serious dog I know

The absence of a final task.
(His bark becomes so plateresque.)
Jocasta’s hardship melts the snow…
The only serious dog I know

Is on precocious wisdom’s trail.
Your apperception tugs his tail.
For Tiresias, you set aglow
The only serious dog I know.

Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and US Air Force veteran. He’s published a full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe” (White Violet Press), along with three chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision) and “The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas” (Alien Buddha Press).

Jason Ryberg

1)Heavy Doth Hang the Head that Wears the Hubcap Diamond Star Halo


The Angel of Death
is a crow pecking at some-
thing in the gutter,

and the folds of the
wind’s black velvet curtains sweep
back and forth across

the sidewalks and streets,
shuffling a flood of dead leaves,
Styrofoam cups and

candy wrappers, here
and there, and the faint strains of
a mysterious

violin seem to
be following us through the
dark twists and turns of

this unfamiliar
city, and the full moon is
looking right through us

with its wide owl’s eye,
our every step jingling with
keys and spare change (though

there’s really no such
thing as spare change or spare time,
for that matter, and

the locks to all our
keys have been switched), and a spray-
painted piece of ply-

wood that’s boarding up
a broken window in an
old burned-out warehouse

reads heavy doth hang
the head that wears the hubcap
diamond star halo.

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. 

Cecil Morris

A Second Wedding Vow for You


This was supposed to be my anchorage,
my safe harbor secure from sea tumult,
from wind and rage and wrack, a holy place.

I swore before the God you swear is real
and watching every sin, before the crowd
of saints and both our families, all our friends,

and you promised, too, made a pledge to keep.
I did not believe in your god but did
believe in you forever for always,

the sanctity of love, all its symbols,
the flowers bunched, the round of wedding ring,
the goddamn wedding dress yet in fashion.

What I promise you now, an oath I’ll keep:
to post on your Facebook page, your Linked-in,
everywhere someone might look for you

the most private letters you wrote to me,
thus rid myself of you and bring you shame.
And, of course, I’ll sell the dress and the ring.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in 2River View, Common Ground Review, Lascaux Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. Morris’s debut poetry collection, At Work in the Garden of Possibilities, came out from Main Street Rag in 2025.

Hiatus Finished!

Hi All--

I finally got access to the place where the sausage is made. Here.

Look for new content soon.

Rusty

Brian Builta

Things No War Can Touch


I hear it badly,
birdsong tirritirriti,
a fickle machinery.

Someone pops a top
as the sun rises
glorious and indifferent.

Something round is afoot,
despite derring-do and what-not
it will arrive.

Amid cricket chatter
you and your corpuscles
blunder along.

Then there’s the sheer fluid beauty
after being stuck,
of having come through

yet again.

Brian Builta divides his time between a bedroom and a kitchen in Arlington, Texas. His poetry has been published most recently in yolk, Delta Poetry Review and Innisfree Poetry Journal. He is frequently overdramatic and is currently experiencing a dark night of the soul. He is the author of A Thursday in June and more of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

Stay Home

I should stay home more often
that way I would know my destination.
I believe the bathroom mirror
would make a fine photographer.

The fragrance of my perfume

is all for show for the woman I love.
Work makes me feel like taking a day off.

I brush my teeth with garlic

to keep the vampires away
at night. If I had more time to live,

I would forget so many things.

I never know which way I am going.

Born in Mexico, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poetry, poetry books, and poetry chapbooks have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Homestead Review, In The Grove, Kendra Steiner Editions, Live Nude Poems, Poet’s Democracy, Propaganda Press, Pygmy Forest Press, and Unlikely Stories. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.

Jake Sheff

 Blackguarding Merles
 
You mock a dahlia’s faith in rain
And March’s hieratic pain
In Wotan’s one good eye. I show
The only serious dog I know
 
The absence of a final task. 
(His bark becomes so plateresque.) 
Jocasta’s hardship melts the snow…
The only serious dog I know
 
Is on precocious wisdom’s trail.
Your apperception tugs his tail.
For Tiresias, you set aglow
The only serious dog I know. 

Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and US Air Force veteran. He’s published a full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe” (White Violet Press), along with three chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision) and “The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas” (Alien Buddha Press).

Kenneth Pobo

HI DEATH

It may come to me like a
telegram, only a few words,
terse, impossible to ignore. Or
it may be seductive, wooing me
(are people wooed anymore?)
and knowing how my flesh
is weak, I’ll give in. Maybe
it will come like a plane’s shadow
over our house. It only takes
a second. My grandfather died
that way, crossing a street. It may
come like that picture of Jesus
knocking on our heart’s door,
half god, half salesman. I can
choose to not be home—or can I?

One day I may welcome it,
however it comes,
body, spirit, used up, ready to leave,
holding a blanket before

letting it go.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of thirty-three chapbooks and fifteen full-length collections.  Recent boo ks include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press) and It Gets Dark So Soon Now (Broken Tribe Press).  His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere. 

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

Wax Cups

The bridge over the Long Island Expressway

was a jackdaw cutting through holiday traffic.

a father flanked by young daughters,

McDonald’s sodas in hand,

bundled in winter coats,

watched the cars below.

The daughter to the left,

her ponytail unfurling with flyaways

at the temples—

in middle school we called them “wings”—

jumped, pointing at cars,

as we slipped along underneath.

They were 495 East sentinels

celebrating a winter ritual.

Years from now, with the snow

falling sideways, they’d recall

icy hands pressed

against waxy cups,

while the world sped under their feet—

their dad in the center of it all.

Museums exist, hovering

over small towns, contained

entirely in watching bodies.

We tread well-traveled paths

until we reach the bridges

suspended above our childhood.

“Remember?” the girl in the pink coat

will ask her winged sister,

and they’ll see times

they didn’t know were sacred

until much later.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in West Philadelphia. She edits HOOT Review, a magazine published on postcards, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, a broadside press, and was an editor for Lunch Ticket from 2015 to 2017. Jane-Rebecca is the author of the flash fiction collections, Better Bones (Thirty West Publishing House) and Thirst and Frost (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), as well as the poetry collection Eleven Hundred (Really Serious Lit), and others. She works as a paralegal for an immigration law firm, and likes cats and salt. 

Ma Yongbo

 Line by line retranslation of Ashbery

Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so

Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth

Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door

Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years.

Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror

And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal

Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly

A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean

A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion

In between is the void filled with power

This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time

Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain

Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface

Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones

They only stop temporarily in order to focus

Forming some kind of meaning, then they are quickly swept away

By the randomness of a hasty retrospective flood

This is more like a dream that a person struggles with but still cannot wake from

Maybe he doesn't really want to wake up

Finding himself in an uninhabited street

In the silence just as the last bus leaves

In the steam, the taillights flicker dimly

This is a climate without scenery, it is something nameless

Moving, appearing and disappearing, erasing some, and then adding some from the void

Adding something, originally the messenger and the message were one

How to receive the infinite return of the Möbius strip

What you have experienced, you know nothing about

And poetry is an understanding of this pain, and also a forgetting

Whether the reward is a reed flute, or separation of body and head

It will all enter a distilled space

Like bees living in the nest of the sun

And these, whether they are enough for me

Pretending that nothing happened, continue to sing

This may be the barbarian plundering in Rome

Defined safe zone, several temples scattered on hills

Let us continue with determination

Tell others the symbolism, and show the mystery to ourselves

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964,Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry,and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry.He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.

Alison Bell Miller

An Affair on Lombardy Street

The landlocked Airbnb has a nautical theme and an irregularly shaped board nailed to one wall that might work if they installed hooks, I offered to the man I’ve loved for 24 years before we kissed and carried each other into the bedroom.

The backyard is at this time off-limits to guests, though we are encouraged to dispense of our trash there due to an ant problem for which we may be charged. Renters may also be charged for using acne products immediately prior the towels.

Likewise, silicone lubricants are prohibited. The Airbnb sits a block and a half from the marketwhere my cousin and I used to buy croissant sandwiches when the jazz bar closed where the man I’ve loved for 24 years used to play.

The Airbnb has a keypad for a lock and I give him the code. I wake to his face for the first time in years. I send him home in a shirt wearing wrinkles and the perfume my ex-husband sayssmells like my mother.

My hosts have left two thick, hooded robes hanging in the closet. When the man I’ve loved for 24 years leaves, I draw one around my naked shoulders step in front of the mirror on the bathroom door. I look at my flat belly, my limp curls, and see who I was always meant to be.

Alison Bell Miller (she/her) is a writer and sex educator. She has published two chapbooks, Flowering, (adj.) by Weasel Press and blink by BarBar Press. Her work has also been published in various literary magazines including Hobart Pulp, Anti-Heroin Chic, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Cultural Daily. The owner of sex positive adult boutiques in Richmond, Virginia, she currently resides in San Diego.

William Doreski

Trespassing Aloud

Listening to the wind misspell
my name I sense desperation,
a bruise of waxen yellow flesh.

The wind explores the ruins
of a factory abandoned decades
ago, a complex of smokestacks

and oil tanks, brown weathered brick
and rusting machines the use
of which no one alive knows.

Why is the wind taunting me
with its private misery when
grease stains almost eighty years old

still offer comforting stinks.
I shouldn’t be here exploring
private if useless property.

I should go home and practice
spelling my name correctly
in case the wind has influenced

my flimsy sense of myself.
The factory closed after the war.
Not even mice find sustenance

or aesthetic pleasure in noting
the aloof geometry, purposeful
and rigid enough to warp the wind.

I pocket a large rusty bolt
and declare myself a petty thief,
giving voice to all this loss.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Mark Danowsky

Our Most Vulnerable

Maybe the phrase has
always meant to misdirect

A gunmen is taking aim
at shadows in dark corners

It must be someone’s job to ask
after each life still here

I was once someone noticed
each must consider

No fear I know like alone
awake & shaking

Losing all my grounding thoughts
with no protectors left

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of four poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press). Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2025. His poems have appeared in many journals including Right Hand Pointing, The New Verse News, Eunoia Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Summerset Review, Alba, The Healing Muse, and Gargoyle.

Ken Cathers

skin


this skin has started
to fray

reveals a torn elbow
a tattered knee

a body stitched up
too many times.

I tug at stray threads loose buttons
watch my days unravel.

this is a poor material
to work with
the weave all wrong

a coat grown thin
and faded
     a patchwork blanket.

I wait for the scars
to harden

a fresh skin to emerge
pink, beautiful

become new, grow
from the inside out
but I have slid

from silk to denim
become a worn fabric

that cannot be shed
there is a wound

that doesn’t close
a bruise that never heals

when the night is cold
I am a cheap cloth

that will not mend

Ken Cathers as a  B.A. from the University of Victoria and a M.A. from York University in Toronto.  He has just published his eighth book of poetry entitled Home Town with Impspired Press in England. He has also recently published two chapbooks, one entitled Kiefer by broke press and the other entitled Legoland Noir by Block Party Press. His work has appeared in publications from Canada, the United States, Australia, Ireland, England, India ,the Netherlands, Hong Kong  and Africa. Some of his recent work has appeared in Plato’s Cave, The McGuffin, Acta Victoriana,  Zoetic Press, The Carried Away, Wild Words and The Blue Unicorn. He lives on Vancouver Island with his family in a small colony of trees.

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.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.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.

Karl Koweski

retaliation

it was two weeks
after you returned
from rehab, dad
I found the first
vodka bottle,
a Smirnoff pint,
stashed beneath
the driver's seat
of your Ford.

I propped the
empty on the
dashboard like
a bobble-head.

I didn't tell you
this then, but...

going into my room
and leaving my
dog-eared copies
of Penthouse on
my pillow next
to the Vaseline...

that was a
pretty good comeback.

Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

A.S. Coomer

black coffee blues

all the cups we carry
the sloshing of pell-mell life
like drunks on the last ferry outta town

montage of deja vu
whipping neck down
to check steam rise

the careful setting
of the same vessel
of the same sun & moon

backdrop drips indigo
a river of black coffee
drought stricken
gone too soon

A.S. Coomer is a writer & musician. Books include MEMORABILIA, BIRTH OF A MONSTER, SHINING THE LIGHT, THE FLOCK UNSEEN, THE FETISHISTS, & many others. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a "record label" for poetry.