Rob Plath

my father prided himself on being
a thug, a leg breaker, a thief
whose every third word was cunt or motherfucker
& usually aimed at his own family
but he wouldn't allow his 12-year-old son
to have a miniature swiss army knife
i remember he grabbed it from my hands 
& kept it himself in the drawer
w/ other larger knives & a pistol
i loved the knife back then 
the way it snapped in & out of its thin bed 
but when i grew older & disinterested
in knives & bb guns 
i found i possessed another kind of edge 
passed down to me thru the centuries 
a beautiful blade sheathed in the skull
which grows sharper & sharper 
& never is in need of the grindstone

Rob Plath is a 46-year-old poet from New York. He has over a dozen books out. He is most known for his collection A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY (epic rites press). He lives alone with his cat and stays out of trouble. See more of his work at http://www.robplath.com.

Carlos A. DeJuana

Day of the Dead

They walk among us,

snickering at our costumes

but secretly wishing

they could dress in our flesh.

While we lay marigolds

at their graves,

they sneak into our homes

through drafty windows

to catch up on Games of Thrones,

fast forwarding through commercials

so they can get back

before St. Peter locks the door.

Before they leave,

they rummage

through family albums

and flip through the photos on our phones

while we sleep,

desperately trying to remember

who they once were.

Carlos A. DeJuana spent nine years working as a journalist across Latin America before settling in Washington, DC, where he now works for the federal government.  His poetry has appeared in riverSedge, a literary journal published by the University of Texas-Pan American, and most recently in the online journal Synesthesia. He is married and has two daughters.  When he is not working, taking care of his girls, or writing, he greatly enjoys naps.

Tom Darin Liskey

Oral History

Her husband found work

Teaching in a backcountry schoolhouse

After the war.

It wasn’t her first choice, she said,

But in lean times like those,

You took what opportunity presented.

They headed west

In a beat up Ford truck

Given to the couple in dowry.

The birth of their first child followed—

A boy with sandy hair and blue eyes.

She named the child after her husband,

But everyone called him Little Bit.

It was a happy time, she said.

Living in an old farm house

On the edge of an alfalfa field 

Paid for by the school board.

The teacher’s salary was paltry,

But the children’s parents would bring them: 

Potatoes. Onions. Ham. Apples. Butter.

Whatever bounty the season had to offer. 

The weather turned sour early that year

And the baby caught a fever.

People remembered it as the worst winter ever.

Despite the prayers and doctoring,

Sickness took the child one moonless night.

But the man and woman had to wait 

To lay their firstborn to rest

Until some men from church

Built a fire to thaw out

The iron hard ground for burial.

Even in her 80s, when she talked about 

Dressing her son for the funeral—

Her hands moved hesitantly

In their grim remembrance of that day.

And in that instance,

I saw, not an old woman,

But memory’s ghost: A young mother

Standing at the edge of a bed 

Where a child lay bathed in lemon water

And slanted winter light,

Brushing the boy’s hair for the last time.

Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in the Crime Factory, and Driftwood Press. His photographs have been published in Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Synesthesia Literary Journal and Midwestern Gothic. 

Michael McInnis

From Up on the Row of Garage Roofs We Threw Broken Shingles Down at the Cops

my mother
heard my description
over the scanner
I told her I had
never seen
Orion brighter,
but Kahoutek looked
like a dirty
smudge in the
rake of blue
light.

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, The Commonline Journal, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine and Yellow Chair Review to name a few.

Heidi Blakeslee

My Roots of Loneliness

my mother's favorite
thing to do with us when we
were little kids was to
dump us off at someone else's house
or leave us
with a babysitter

in the summers, when
we had off
she would take us to a park
in Conneautville
in sweltering heat
and leave us there all day
with some sort of poorly-run
situation for low-income families

we would eat a bag lunch
consisting of a sandwich, a piece of fruit
and a carton of chocolate milk

it wasn't all bad
i learned to play chess there,
and sometimes I would make
a friend for a day

we would walk the block or so away
to go to the library

but i remember spending
the majority of the days
waiting for my mother
to pick us up
in the minivan

for her to love us
and be with us

however
briefly

Heidi Blakeslee lives and writes in Ambridge, Pa.  She has been published in many chapbooks, zines, and newsletters over the years.  She also has two poetry books, "The Empress of Hours," and "Should the Need Arise," a memoir, "The White Cat: A Paranormal Memoir," and a novel, "Strange Man: The Edgar Allan Foe," available on amazon.com. 

Scott Wozniak

Sweat to Live

Today

I was at work

shoveling dirt,

moving

wheelbarrows

and carrying

cinder blocks

from here

to there.

 

During all this

I realized I

will most-likely

never receive

easy money

for my poems.

 

Then I thought

of the one word,

Yamrus poem,

“Endure,”

 

and how he’d

summed up

my whole

life.

Scott Wozniak is a poet and chaos enthusiast who's work has been widely published both online and in-print. Most recently, he was featured in the Lummox #5 Anthology. Also, look for his work in the Svensk Apache Press anthology, due out this fall. You can follow him on twitter @sewozniak.

JB Mulligan

mulching

The crunch of rotted wood and mold

as the pitchfork bites in, then pulls.

The wobble of unruly wheelbarrows

down the cobblestone path of the park.

Raking the mounds over patches of dirt

in the grass, around trees and bushes,

next to the stone wall.  The body groans

underneath the screaming yellow T-shirt

slashed with the sponsor's name.

A day off from work to work harder.

Those who did and do this every day,

who scratch life from indifferent soil,

don't joke about beer and back rubs,

or watch a perfect ass in taut gray pants

clench, release, clench, release,

behind that skittering rat of a dog.

Life somewhere might be limited to

a woman who has sagged with work and children,

whose face is a soft puddled smile

that used to light like a lover's moon.

But here, I get this T-shirt,

and we stop at noon for free pizza.

JBMulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 40 years. He has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and two e-books, The City Of Now And Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation from the Bible). He has appeared in several anthologies, among them, Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal); and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.