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.