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.