Tony Brewer

The Doctor Is In

Sitting in my car gloving up
before mask on to buy groceries

I’m in Mindy West’s old
Ford Fiesta – 1986 we’re parked
in gravel between cornfields

her back seat jammed with wet
swim practice towels

as we navigate her stick shift
for a hustle in the front buckets

Gloving up with the news on
is Bon Jovi out of a boom box

because her car has no stereo
and every time feels like that first

Gloves snug as jeans
opening the nitrile cuff and inserting
my fingers bunched as bananas
flexing in ecstasy at the bind

carefully rough and excited
and scared and embarrassed

adding a layer of alone
is nothing like in the movies

her eager smile and that damp
hair in that moonlight

while at Kroger beneath the stare
of 360-degree surveillance lot cams

projected death tolls I cannot turn off
not feeling wild – wild in the streets

She guiding like a nurse
as I operate on a school night

with a playful snap of left glove
skin and breath weaponized

my bare fingers her anticipation
knees banging spasmodic against wheel wells

All survival acts should taste like this

I step out quiet in the populated void
onto the angled painted parking of a city

neither desperate nor essential
but still here and makeshift masked

bandana close as her mouth
wiping down the cart like a murderer
when once we were all over each other’s hands

rolling bravely through the automatic
sliding doors into a touchable doom
where not a soul can see me smile

Tony Brewer has lived in Indiana forever. His is author of The History of Projectiles (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) and Pity for Sale (Gasconade Press, 2022), among other titles. More at tonybrewer71@blogspot.com.

Tom Barlow

When the Music's Over

the first time a young person
yields hir seat on the bus to me
I will throw down / my target
dressed in bell bottoms and tie-dyes /

head band and peace sign /
following me like I was holding
a joint behind my ear / on my way
to The Lizard King's grave /

past the ghosts of American flags
we flew upside down in front of
the White House / back in the day
when we loathed ourselves for

all the faces our people trampled as
we scrambled to hold the high ground /
but the shame did not outlast
the costume / and our zero sum games

meant that ambition had to build
a bonfire of our poems and guitars /
we escaped Love Street by
that light / but the suckers who

staked themselves to 1968 right
through the heart found that
their blood at retail would
barely pay for the time machine

that set them down here to see
how the clouds carry such regret
for riders on the storm.

Tom Barlow is an Ohio author of poetry, short stories and novels. His writings have appeared in  journals and anthologies including  PlainSongs, Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, Aji,  The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See more at tombarlowauthor.com.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

Everything Crumbles

How everything crumbles
like a cookie, like snow-
men who get too warm.
See the sad faces sitting
in rickety chairs holding
a book of sad poems

read from top to bottom.
The moonlight poems are
the worst. Silence fills every

room in the house. How
the tumblers and bumblers
fall on slippery streets.
They do not cry when their
bottoms bruise up in the
cold Polar-like pavement.

Luis is the author of Make the Water Laugh (Rogue Wolf Press, 2020) and eight chapbooks from Kendra Steiner Editions, including Make the Light Mine (2016). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Ariel Chart, Blue Collar Review, Escape Into Life, and Otoliths. He lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles.

Gary Carter

Hear Her Hellbent Leaving

what can you really say about a lanky lovely girl
who invites you home where you discover
in the ratty bedroom only a rumpled sleeping bag
snuggled close to a gutted chevy engine
with every scattered part duly noted & numbered
in order that one day soon she will return
every nut bolt part & pulley to its rightful place
before jamming the greasy hulk
into a down & out camaro ragtop
still somewhat metallic blue but leaning toward rust
that will propel her down the highway & in her words
out of this shit town toward neon dreams of a kick-ass life
where nothing is improbable
everything is possible & hell hath no fury
like a small-town girl chasing big-city dreams

tell you what you can say:

you say go kick the living shit out of life
take everything you want until the day you roar back
into this little town to make the rounds
tell everyone in no uncertain terms to kiss your sweet ass
& then blast back out laughing like a crazy banshee
hellbent toward the sun & whatever is over the horizon

roll on sweet mama pedal to the floor

make that engine moan

Gary Carter believes pushing words around until they sometimes make sense seems to make sense, and it’s too late to stop now. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in such eclectic outlets as Nashville Review, Deep South Magazine, Steel Toe Review, Dead Mule, The Voices Project, Silver Birch, Real South, Delta Poetry Review and Read Short Fiction. Forthcoming is a collection of short fiction entitled Kicking Dante’s Ass, and a new novel, Not Dark Yet, is making the rounds. Based in North Carolina, he also sells a little real estate on the side.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

In response to a text that said what else could I have done? 

I've wet bedsheets with blood from stagnated piercings; middle-of-the-night fugitive weight. Earlier I was a monster, with no action as my only other option. I didn't know how to yell no at the time or that giving gifts of puncture wounds in that moment would hurt worse than the lightning scrambling through my body raising the hair on my arms and neck. Later at night, existing outside myself, the storms subsided absorbed by the bed. I imagined the mattress as soil, and the blood as springtime sun showers; and maybe one day, somewhere else, potions of puncture wounds will feed others. And then, I will become a gardener growing again.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Better Bones and Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House, The Guessing Game published by BA Press, Thirst and Frost from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, A Practical Almanac for Surviving Inside the Human Body from Bottlecap Press, and Eleven-Hundred forthcoming from Really Serious Literature.

James Diaz

Dystonia

All night I watch as the rain
collects inside of things left out on the porch
some god above tossing out her empties from the sky
I think of my mother
her ache a million miles long
and a century deep
there is a moment when the word you want to use uses you
and a body too
wrecked in on itself so long ago
the mileage on it has become the soul

a family on a highway
a small girl goes through a window
and is never again the same

and before that
so many hands being put where they ought not

I tell you
the body’s memory
is ruthless

there is a dream I have
where she is no longer hurting
where her ribs are not crashing into her lungs like waves
and she doesn’t have to flail her arms to be heard
she does not drown in a goddamn thing

she takes to the lighthouse
finds all the other versions of herself
drags them up from the undertow
places them by her side
says; let’s ride

her body is her own
she . doesn’t . move . a . muscle
and it’s all right
the light when it hits
is golden endless

what I’m trying to say is
I want for my mother a better story than she gave me

even this wanting: it’s her gift to me.

I see rain, I think pain
I see pain, I think mother
must have
carried that little girl
all these years from that wreckage
inside herself

like the wind howling dark mercy
can’t you hear it, it’s always been mercy
this song of hers

and I give it and give it
wanting her to be whole and still
and alright

mama, it’s all right
I know. I know.

When you go, let it be to the lighthouse
let it be where no hands touch you wrong ever
where no car crashes and no neurology misfires
where a body is just a body is just a lighthouse
calling every last one of her sister-selves home
and safe and unbroken.

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2016) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021) as well as founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Rust + Moth, Cobra Milk, Bullshit Lit and Cleaver Magazine. They currently reside in upstate New York.

Gabriel Hart

Shelter to Cinder

I tore apart the tweaker’s shack
now, firewood for the winter
my little way of getting back
at them, when they burnt
their shelter to cinder
their field mice
escaped
to bunk with me
assuming they were evading
flame
yet all I’m doing here: waiting
for the half-sane
human being
to earn
my heating
a reason
to learn
the discipline
of a controlled
burn

Gabriel Hart lives in Morongo Valley in California’s High Desert. His literary-pulp collection Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell is out now from Close to the Bone (U.K.). He's the author of Palm Springs noir novelette A Return To Spring (2020, Mannison Press), the dispo-pocalyptic twin-novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (2019, Traveling Shoes Press), his debut poetry collection Unsongs Vol. 1., and the Pushcart-nominated story "The Maid and the Maidens." He's a regular contributor at Lit Reactor and Los Angeles Review of Books.