Daniel Damiano Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

The Day Begins When…

by Daniel Damiano

the bed is made,
            the shades are pulled up full mast,
                        the wind chimes are awakened
                                    by semi-conscious knuckles,
            the coffee is brewed,
the cat is fed,
            the birds on the fire escape have their seeds
and their iced-over water bowls
are doused with warmth,
            the showerhead spews
                        and the bathroom steams
and the coffee is sipped
            while the cat eats,
                        while the birds eat,
and the chimes have gone back
                                                to sleep.

Mother & Daughter on the R Train at 9:45pm on a Wednesday

They sit
side by side
blankly gazing
at the passing
stations
with the same
auburn eyes,
the same
pointed nose,
the same
chiseled cheekbones
and dimpled chin,
before the daughter
leans her
similarly oblong
head
against her mother’s
chest,
hears the same heartbeat,
then sits up
as their destination
approaches,
before they look at each other,
as if
by ritual;
the mother
seeing herself,
the daughter
seeing her mother.

Their Marriage Was a Pending Divorce

He would arrive
on occasion;
a cameo appearance
reminding us
that he still lived there;
even then I could tell
she was ignored,
as if we resided there in secret
to his other life.
There were no conversations
between them
that I can recall,
only exclamations,
and sometimes I looked
through the words
they spit at each other
and saw another child;
a silhouette of myself,
with flailing limbs,
screaming for silence.

Signs of Aging

When
you begin to wonder
how old you were
when certain childhood
movies
came out,
or the embryonic
stage you were
at
during the Apollo 11
mission,
and if you were even a gleam
in anyone’s eye
when Armstrong
sauntered
onto the lunar surface
and stole Aldren’s
thunder.

BIO

Daniel Damiano is an Award-winning Playwright, Pushcart-nominated Poet, acclaimed Novelist and Actor based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the recent recipient of the 2024 David A. Einhorn Playwriting Prize, presented by Untitled Theater Company No. 61 in NYC. He has thus far published two books of poetry, 104 Days of the Pandemic (2021, fandango 4 Art House) and, most recently, The Concrete Jungle and the Surrounding Areas (2024, Bottlecap Press), along with three novels, The Woman in the Sun Hat (2021), Graphic Nature (2022) and, most recently, Advice from a Cat (2024), all from fandango 4 Art House. His acclaimed play Day of the Dog is published by Broadway Play Publishing. His poems have thus far been published in the MacGuffin, Four Tulips, Gyroscope Review, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, Curlew Quarterly, Quagmire Magazine, Crooked Teeth Literary Magazine, Newtown Literary Journal, Cloudbank, New Voices Anthology and HotMetal Press.

Cleo Griffith Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

Brushstrokes, Museum Piece

by Cleo Griffith

Neither the jade in the closed cabinet
nor the kimono on the wall caught his attention
but the word upon the side of the Chinese screen,
a lovely black brush-stroke word on the pale wood
of the folding screen which was covered with scarlet fabric
and embroidered golden dragons of fearsome features,
none of which he noticed, so taken was he with the word.

Surely, he thought, something that beautiful
must be profound, must hold
one of the secrets of life within an ebony flourish.

No, he was told, it is only the name of the man
who made the screen. Disappointed, he left, wondering
why it should strike such a chord in him,
merely the name of the craftsman. Only the name
of the creator.

It’s been a long time since I’ve swung a machete

Had it been a box of candy,
a bag of seedless tangerines,
I might have taken a teeny taste,
at least a sample, before sending out
enquiries, but green coconuts?

Had it been a gift of strawberries
or other yummy produce from nearby
I might have made a shortcake
with only casual questions
regarding those responsible.

So I took a coconut in hand,
checked with neighbors
“had this carton been delivered
that was meant for them?” but
no one knew why anyone would leave
coconut juice still inside its original containers
on the porch of an elderly couple.

Had it been a gift of two strong men
to wash the windows, clean the gutters,
even clowns with balloons to entertain
would have pleased, we’re easy.

Had I been younger by a lot of years
I might have been tempted to take a whack
and see what the juice was all about
but it’s been a long time since I swung a machete
so I passed them off to the teenager next door.

Of Course Life is a Path of Metaphors

Sun slants in and lightens corners,
daffodils rise from winter’s chill,
flotsam of the flood refigures landscapes,
broken man learns to trust again.

Monday through the blindman’s eyes,
ruby sunrise the day after you have died,
smiles from those you never met,
storms slap-slash across imagined seas.

Mockingbird repeats in December,
bare soles interpret Summer’s heat,
inner child meets inner witch,
both weep.

Old Familiar

This is not a cute pet of a dragon,
no fluttery feminine eyelashes,
no gentle whispery breath,
this is the fire-breather of old,
the glassy-eyed, ravaged with fury,
green and gory dragon
aroused deep within that calm appearance.
It hates, it drools, it spits fire and nails,
lashes and slashes,
denigrates and insults,
beats down and tears up,
shatters and pulverizes,
eats out your insides,
becomes greener
with age,
dies never
of
its envy.

BIO

Cleo Griffith has been widely published in such journals as Main Street Rag, Lothlorien and Straylight. She has been on the Editorial Board of the poetry quarterly, Song of the San Joaquin, since it began in 2003.

Emma Johnson-Rivard Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

DD

by Emma Johnson-Rivard

Consider the universe contained
in a glass. This is a metaphor, a tool
worked on all levels, as the poets do.
The process creates an individual, aimed to
understand some shade of our reality. Something
beyond the self. I’ve been asked if I drink. It’s assumed
I drink. I come from a family of artists and alcoholics, the path
splintered. We didn’t mean to go so strange. This is the
paradox. I think about these things. The question remains.
Their nature assumed. Sobriety written in DNA to avoid
inevitability, or yet another metaphor. Actually, they’re
not. This is as literal as it gets but their nature assumes
an exception. The idea falls within. Don’t mistake the point.
I’m talking about a brink now, the looming, the heritage of
biology and nurture. A friend asked me. She already knew, but
I told her again. The telling is a powerful addition, repeated
time after time. What happened next was metaphor, too,
so to speak. A mirror inside both of us, our journey. We
know what we could be.

A Weak Heart

Do you ever feel anxious?

Science argues that every emotion,
any instrument, can be used
to great effect. The human body
makes this effortless. Allow me
to demonstrate. If you can’t,
then you must be deficient
somehow. This will be going
in your chart.

When feeling anxious, I have learned to begin
by focusing on my hands and the reality
of known threats rather the weight of my
weak heart. This is the lesson learned. You
wanted monsters and so I focus.
I grab the throat
I begin.

Sea Glass, or The Poet Reads Opinion Pieces

I have been bitten. A mouth angles,
focused on the crux. I don’t care for
a kiss these days. Nonetheless, we,

royal, dream of monsters as the waves crash
and break. The beach bleeds glass,
always shining upon our era. So it goes.

Suffer beautiful and stoic, please,
as the reels demand. Otherwise,
you might seem ungrateful.

Have you made a wish, my dear?
I collect them now, beloved
among my scars. I cannot name the
ending, this is beyond me. But

define power for me, please. I would
like to know how it goes. At the end,
we are enduring great pain, we

would like to know the cost
was worth the words.

BIO

Emma Johnson-Rivard is a doctoral student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Coffin Bell, Red Flag Poetry, and others. She can be found at Bluesky at @blackcattales and at emmajohnson-rivard.com.

Charles Grosel Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

Walking the Dogs in the Morning

by Charles Grosel

The tug of leashes, the sting of the morning sun,
halos of spray sizzling on the speckled sidewalk, heat-heaved,
canting us toward each other as the recurring numbness
crackles up my legs, a deadness between feet and thigh,
between us, you willing to hold me up, me too tempted to let you.
I hand you the leather loop instead, careen to the stop sign, leaden,
unbalanced, grabbing hold of the metal post and stomping my legs back to life.
The prickle of feeling returns, the shadow of something else recedes
for now. Keep walking, I urge you, and you do, a quick glance back,
the dogs eagerly nosing the green blades of yucca lining the path.

Time’s Hard Lesson

When I was about eight, at the end of the summer we moved near
a new development in a small city known for its apple orchards. Our
southern colonial with its four pillars and faux black shutters was not
part of the development, technically, though built at the same time.
Our house sat between two of the original farmhouses whose families
had sold the orchards and the not-yet-completely bulldozed woods
surrounding them. Lanes and Trails and Circles had already been paved
in concrete, demarcated by their rounded curbs, but when we arrived,
only a few houses had been built, their green sod squares brightly
artificial against the churned-up earth. The streets emptied into woods.

Three prune trees lined our front yard, the fruit tasty when ripe, effective
projectiles when green or soft with rot. The two neighbors kept dozens
of apple trees in what remained of their yards. The man to the west
sprayed the trees for pests and sold the apples in baskets arranged neatly
on the lawn. The man to the east, whose land my father had bought to
build his dream house, let his apples go to worm. In his workshop he
kept a cider press he showed me how to use that fall. You dewormed
the apples with a pocketknife, passed them through a hand-cranked
grinder into a wooden bucket, then screw-pressed the mash to drain into
a plastic container and funneled the result into dusty moonshine jugs.
You could taste the golden scent of the apple spray in the afternoon sun.

I walked alone in what was left of the woods wearing rubber boots
against the mud, a temporary hermit, a pilgrim, a contemplative
shut into my head by the slurp and slosh of my steps, then, as winter
came, by the crackle of iced-over puddles and bulldozer tracks. I don’t
remember what I did on those walks. Walked. Thought about things.
I was not a junior botanist or geologist sorting rocks. I walked, my
breath hardening in my chest, the slap of branches on my arms. I was
there and not there. Not observing myself, exactly. Settling into myself.

For children everything will be as it is until they learn the hard lesson
of time. When the ice thawed into mud that spring, then dried enough to
hold the backhoes clawing out basements in the pegged-off lots, the split
level castles sprang up, their chimneys’ lining the streets, devouring
the woods that had likely earned the name only in my imagination.

So, You’re Dead

So, you’re dead. Have been for years, and I didn’t
even know it, which gives lie to what you
told me over and again, how we had
a connection, something about the soul,
you said, but it wasn’t the soul you were after,
and wouldn’t I have felt the thread snap?

So, you’re dead. What do you want me to say?
That I’ll miss you? That the “seduction,” as you
liked to call it, was on me because I
was privileged white and never learned no, that
I was thirsty for—something—but not that,
though you always claimed to know me better.

So, you’re dead. What do I call you, now? Dear
departed? Old friend? Mentor? Seducer?
Worse? We are running the train on names here
through a hole in the donut of memory,
when even now I’m not sure. The drugs? Or
is that another thing I invented?

So, you’re dead. And out of my life so long
you can’t put that on me, though back then
you tried to convince me that only my
touch could ease the migraines, that only I
stood between you and your father’s rusty
revolver. I must have believed you.

So, you’re dead. Where are the books
you promised me, the library in the attic
of your parents’ home, smooth pine boards
lining the walls, your early death held out
before me like a beacon or a goad.
Am I more to blame if I still want them?

So, you’re dead. But not so early. I’d say
you can’t hurt me now, but follow the trail
of words. I suppose I should thank you. What else
would I write about? You’re dead, though what
you did to me isn’t, yet, no matter
how many times I take a pen to it.

BIO

Charles Grosel is an editor, writer, and poet living in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Fiction Southeast, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin and poems in Nimrod, The Threepenny Review, Kestrel, Cream City Review, and Harpur Palate, among others. His chapbook of poems is The Sound of Rain Without Water.

See more at www.write4success.net

J. Scott Lewis Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

Honeycrisp Hand Grenade

by J. Scott Lewis

The one with the brown rotting bruise
circling a pinprick hole. That is where the fuse goes.
It’s where little flies feast, sucking
tongues against fermented flesh.

They are of no consequence,

easily dispersed with a wave of a hand.

I could cut it away, dig into clean ivory tissue
remove the carbuncle from the core
find out how far the fuse descends below the crust
but what good would that do?

Once the fuse is lit there is no going back.

You cannot disarm what wants to explode.

Trapping a fly between my teeth,
I tear into foul flesh, softness oozing
into gums, sour rancid shape swirling
across my tongue like mud gliding downhill.

Red flak explodes against my tongue

shattering reverie into a million bites.

Still Life

Mosquito parades along my wall,
licking blue gray paint, high
step strutting peering into cracks.
It pauses on a grease stain that
resembles abraham lincoln opening a
can of sardines. I don’t remember
how it got there; I just recall that
it is old. Mosquito (pretend
art critic) ponders the portrait,
nods approval. I am sure his
review will create quite a buzz.

In no mood for art
I smash it against the
sardine can, framing it
against the key
adding its print to
my museum of melancholy.

BIO

J. Scott Lewis earned a B.A. in English from Bethany College, WV. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Sociology from Bowling Green State University. He is the author of a textbook as well as numerous academic papers and book chapters. His creative writing has been published in Poetalk, The Harbinger, and the Eastern PA Poetry Review. He is a winner of the Writer’s Garret Common Language Project. His poem “Egret” is on display at the Detroit Lakes, MN, Poetry Walk from June through September 2025. He lives with his family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Photo by Graham Lewis Photography

Alexandra Disabella Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

ENVY

by Alexandra Disabella

Vines are persuasion –
the way they invade,
envelope limbs,
extremities locked
in awkward embrace,
coiling around the warmest parts
possessing pulsating stalks,
rudimentary cotyledon
stifling cordate leaves,
deoxygenated,
infested by mere weed.

A Stone’s Throw from County Jail

The only time my aunt came to visit
was when uncle Mike was thrown in County Jail.
“He didn’t do it”
she said.
But we knew otherwise …
having a penchant for bending boundaries
AND as runt of the dysfunctional bunch
we knew his tendency to take what was not offered
would resurface

like the way the onions from the corner store at the end of the block
marinated the sidewalks and hanging planters
so that with each blowing breeze and insufferable heat
the odor would bake,
ferment.

Uncle Mike was like that, too –
digging his way back into our lives
lingering –
never trying to show up on purpose.

Petty theft, I guess, was his way in
to be as close as stone walls,
barbed wire,
and cuffs would allow.

When the screams would lift through my open window at night,
I’d often try to pick out his voice –
he sounded like suspicion and the pull of a cigarette
breathy,
cautious,
capable of convincing me to set him free.

But mom knew the pattern
the gentle way in which weasels inch into gaping holes,
never self-aware enough to know
they didn’t need saving.

If Raskolnikov was a 16-year-old Girl

It wasn’t my fault.
            She wouldn’t give me what I wanted –
                        20 rubles for mother’s gold cross
                        I needed money,
                        quick
                        no time to invest
                        sweat
                        tears
                        blood …
There was so much blood
            dripping from the temple and slight dip of the frown,
                        falling
            in         and      out of wrinkles
                                                            as the red sludge pooled on worn brown wood.

Shit, shit shit …
Chipped black nails rested over the soft flesh at the base of the jaw

no pulse.

Shit, shit shit …
Scuffed trainers squeaking back and forth,
tendrils knotted,
framing frantic eyes
searching for the way out.

Footsteps mirroring the sound of her pounding chest
echoing the thwack of the bat
as it cracked against a crepe paper covered skull.

She hadn’t even intended it –
the deft way her hand wrapped around the handle
and swung with precision.

She hadn’t even thought to cause harm
until the shopkeeper’s derisive sneer
hung above the left incisor.

I need to get the hell out of here.
Grabbing the bat,
wrapping it inside the left panel of her sweater,
turning toward the slightly ajar door

huuuhh!
Pocketbook thudding to the ground
hands pressed into aged cheeks
as screams rippled down frail frame

thwack

Thud

Boom!
The lock clicked into place,
muted steps raced down the hall
as another red river ran to fill
the bloody pool.

BIO

Alexandra Disabella is an educator and writer based in Pennsylvania. After recently completing her MFA from Wilkes University, she has spent time drafting poetry, memoir, and fiction. An avid baker, she spends countless hours in the kitchen developing new recipes. When she isn’t lesson planning, writing, or baking, she spends time with her husband, cat, and two dogs. Find her at https://www.alexandradisabella.com/

Chuck Rybak Poetry

Poetry

06/18/2025

Small Time

by Chuck Rybak

Come morning you play in the ocean with a child
speaking in waves through the waves
the undertow pulls on the limbs of generations
asks you to come out further closer to the message

The present collapses under the weight
of nothing our species wilts
beneath the specter of our conclusion we order
from Amazon just to have something to look forward to

We must be the shade for the trees
build our ribs into bird nests and lairs
concentrate on slowing ourselves into ice
there’s no time like the past

The world shrinking so fast small lifetime
with no connection to a star outside chronology
our own yards reveal new trees
unnoticed like the snow that never came

Perhaps an estuary will grant you permission to look closely
with only your skin at life unrivaled
living equations of origin and future
each number in its place and without voice

The stump in the yard is still wet
roots sending water to a ringed altar
the accumulated years
still spelling out what we cannot read

Invasive

She says almost nothing on this far island
is native nearly every species invasive
this you have to work at

You have to bring the body
as I have      across the ocean’s horizon
Nothing can just blow here on the wind
Nothing came to aid those already at home      the indigenous
The exotic will come      inexorable      the exotic will leave

What was home is a museum
What was home is thirty species of palm
on a dead poet’s property seeded from his dead wife’s shed
Maybe here off the main road in a town
that sounds like a poem Haiku, Hawaii
is where native lives

I believe my knowledge makes me welcome here
different from the tourists
who come from home
invasive species in print shirts
who see everything as the same kind of pretty

Clichés to End the Lies

A chip off the old lie.
Kill two birds with one lie.

This little liar went to market,
This little liar stayed home.

I took the lie less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.

The third time is a lie.
It’s just a hop, skip, and a lie.

This little liar had roast beef,
This little liar had none.

Good things come to those who lie.
The art of lying isn’t hard to master.

The early bird catches the lie.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the lies
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

And this little liar went wee wee wee all the way home.

BIO

Chuck Rybak lives in Wisconsin and is a Professor of English, Writing, and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, where he coordinates their prison education initiative. He is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Chuck also writes on Substack as The Declining Academic.

Alicia Caldanaro Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

I NEVER HAD MY WISDOM TEETH REMOVED

by Alicia Caldanaro

If now is not part of the past, why does the past often go back and forth in my mind
during present moments? It either hangs over my head like a black cloud or burns like
Jack’s fabulous yellow roman candles. Mouths get canker sores and backs break out in
hives. As the escalator gave my ankles a break from shopping, Santa Claus looked up
at me, smiled, and waved. Raindrops became a shower. Gene Kelly gave me his umbrella
and I started dancing. My dance was not as cool as the dance Jenna Ortega choreographed
and performed herself on Wednesday. However, she wears black, I wear gray, and my
piano teacher told me I was one of her few students who did not need a metronome. What
is it with my veterinarian who explained to me, after she removed forty percent of my cat’s
teeth, that they were rotten because of his poor genetics? She left his front canines and
incisors, but was that supposed to soothe him and me? I named my cat Aslan (“The Great
Lion”) because he processioned between my two rows of orange cosmoses where I counted
twenty-nine aggressive bumblebees pollinating in the hot afternoon. A week after Aslan’s teeth
were yanked out, an abscess developed under his chin and it burst when I was on my way out
the door. I padded his open sore till it stopped bleeding, left him in the house, raced to hear
a poet give a reading, and the day improved. It took a month to not see Aslan’s sore mouth
of red inflamed gums. The only item I ever buy in gas stations is pink bubble gum because
I cannot find it at most grocery stores. My two-year-old niece will repeatedly watch me
blow bubble gum bubbles. One time Grandma Agnes started at the crown of my head and
ran her hand gently down the back of my hair while Aunt Ann handed me a chocolate chip
cookie. Masking tape would not hold up my poster of Mulder and Scully so Mom gave me
duct tape. When I was in second grade, Grandma Rosie gave me my first poetry book,
Marigold Garden by Kate Greenaway. Aslan left a dead bird on my front step today. No one
knows what will happen.

THIS ISN’T AN ALL-NIGHT DINER

I am as mad as Yosemite Sam!
When my feet move forward, the
orchestra gives each stomp a strong
staccato. Take the keys and lock up
my fair lady. You didn’t say UNO!
Lonely preparation
and unmelodious response.
See a penny? pick it up!
Too many choices: Pink Lady, Fuji, McIntosh,
Jonagold, Jazz, Golden Delicious,
Honeycrisp, and Granny Smith.
Grandma always said:
better than sliced bread.
Vegetable knife in my right hand.
Band-Aid on my left thumb. Singed
skin from cookie sheets turns into blisters
that change to small, white, and
unerasable marks. Forthcoming book…
still in progress. Distasteful raw carrots were
inaudibly spat out by a rabbit.
Yosemite Sam strained Mel Blanc’s voice the most.
I make a mean carrot cake despite it all—

HAUNTED NEON LIGHTS

I knew it was over. I folded the red construction paper
in half, drew half a heart on the fold, and the scissors
were too dull to cut the heart out. Time to move on
because…what were we going to do? Hang out? No.
It was time for the sovereign remedies—
I relied on Matt Foley who shouted, “La Dee Frickin’ Da!”
in his “van down by the river,” and who fell a million
different ways then exclaimed, “Whoops-A-Daisy!”
to cheer me up. I laughed along with Elaine when Jerry
put the Tweety Bird Pez dispenser on top of her purse. I
wanted Kramer to put up a screen door and spray potted
azaleas, and afterwards we’d sit on old lawn chairs from
the 1970s: woven straps of green and white stripes held
together with Phillips screws in the aluminum chair frames.
I wanted to grill hamburgers and roast marshmallows
over charcoal. I could not wait to devour the toasted-to-a-light-
brown (on the outside) and the semi-melted, glossy-sweet
fluff (on the inside) of the marshmallows. You knew I was
better when you did not see me crying during most of the Little
House on the Prairie reruns I binged.You were proud of me
when at the midst of a table d’hôte, I did not yodel back to the
lonely goatherd. You laughed when I asked three friends to join
me and we copied the overlapping-legs-walk from the Monkees.
You knew I’d recovered when we watched the flowers growing
by the lamppost that told me it had rhymes for me.

BIO

Alicia Caldanaro was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1968 and graduated from Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, in 1990. She studied at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she earned her Master of Library Science degree and “Specialization in Special Collections” certificate in 1999, which included working on the manuscripts of Athol Fugard. Her past work experience includes being a librarian at academic libraries. Alicia has several published poems, and she took Advanced Poetry Writing courses at Indiana University South Bend in 2023, taught by Professor David Dodd Lee, which encouraged her lifelong love of writing poetry. Her poems have appeared in Plath Profiles, Abandoned Mine, North Dakota Quarterly, Caesura, Analecta, and Laurel Review. Forthcoming: Willow Review. Forthcoming: Alicia will have a book of her poems published by Finishing Line Press entitled, The Needle Has Landed.

John A. deSouza Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Small World

by John deSouza

Just neighborhood stuff around my in-laws’ house that has changed over the many years.
An afternoon with my wife, her old Tato, and her sister, who disarms everyone with passion
and kindness, with an endless sort of generous, contagious, merriment. We are adaptable
and try to find the best in people, learn something, or find something to connect us in the
neighborhood, which is gritty but colorful like the strings of bright yellow, green, pink, orange,
black, red of the woven reed baskets in the Ethiopian store’s window.

The tree is fenced around,
the little metal plaque says Linda’s Shoes, 1974
on the tree’s enclosure.

But more recently Linda’s
has been replaced by Yohana Convenience Store.
(ዮሐና (yoḥānisi) is my prenom in Amharic.)

The world gets smaller to us
in some ways, in others grows in all the new detail.
There are 109 languages spoken

in Ethiopia. Some spill over,
cross into Somalia, are from before borders.
Tigrinya is a little different,

a Semitic language
that dates back 4,000 plus years. Tigray spills
its blood into Eritrea to the North.

The people on Bloor St., here, are tired
of differences and wars, of violence. They miss home,
gather to joke and roast coffee,

attract others from elsewhere
with the rush of caffeine and untraceable sacredness
of Frankincense and popcorn.

The owner tells me of a 6^th century church,
high on a northern mountain that Orthodox Christians
climb as needed to pray.

The rock-hewn space is beyond our yearnings
for reward and recognition. The ascent is treacherous,
from which no one has ever fallen.

In the Woods

These Connecticut streams
resist arrangement. Doubt
splits attention. Will grapples
rocks. A forced overlay
of wakefulness. No lull.

Here is the stream. In
time’s measure softened.
Blur of capture. Softest
as the light dims. Alone
again, practicing intention.

You and this other,
uncompromised. Flirt
that twists through rustled
leaves. This voice also,
torn sky in treetops.

Thought, a violet clarity,
settles throughout, absorbs
retreat. No path follows.
Moon-time and no-time,
darkness, another return.

Dream here at home,
a living expanse stretched,
the unmeasurable years
alternate, emptied, filled again,
lead back, trickle inward.

Altar/Vivtar/Вівтар

But what do I know of famine and war?
Only the pain or thrill of listening to the reports,
images and videos of other people’s suffering.

Unless kitchen talk, around a Ukrainian table,
like a boisterous altar to a benevolent god,
clever people who were there, who survived.

My wife’s family, five generations
of stories that go back centuries—
What to do, listening to Twitter Spaces,

while I fight slow domestic battles over
what’s for dinner, and my politicians
can’t decide how much not to help.

Letterpress Landscape

Something unspeakable.
Say it. Scraggy trees, a stream, snow.
The way the water
flows across the white card
conveys everything.

The experience of black
streams under white snow,
alive but remembered.
Am I the way there?

While the politicians dither,
good and bad people die.
The reporters putting out bait
for the hate-hunters.

Like those hungry ghosts I animate,
thin necks and bloated bellies.
So many questions, and I,
no longer young.

In the Winter scene there is
less suffering. Describe
what isn’t there is another way.

An invisible stream flowing
between me and you reading this,
a printed landscape.

And in the snow, blood, dead
soldiers strewn like straw.

BIO

John A. deSouza’s poetry has been published by WayWords, Apricity Press, The Orchards, All Existing Literary Review, Half Eaten Mouth, David Cope’s Big Scream Magazine, and has been translated in China in New World Poetry. The poems ‘Altar’ and ‘Letterpress Landscape’ are from his recent collection concerning the war in Ukraine, titled Unimaginable Hardship/Zero Line. The first part of this collection, Unimaginable Hardship was recently short-listed for the Letter Review Prize. John’s wife’s family is Ukrainian.

Ron Riekki Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

I can’t eat cold chicken.

by Ron Riekki

It comes from the war where
we’d get fed cold chicken
every night. I’d ask, Isn’t cold
chicken dangerous? There’d be
no reply. Maybe they were
thinking, War is dangerous.
I don’t know. We didn’t speak
much. It was safer that way.
The worry was that bombs
would get dropped on us,
because we were dropping
bombs on them, and the worry
was that they’d attack us,
storm the building, so that,
when I was security and I’d
look into the jungle I could see
scythes of eyes staring back at me,
and, worse, the real worry, I’ll be honest,
was us, the them of us, how there was this
secret hazing that was occurring, said to
try to keep us on our toes, where they,
we, any of us, could come up behind you,
grab you, duct tape your mouth shut,
your hands to your chair, and then
they’d raise you, haul you through
the hall outside where there was
a fence waiting for what they, we,
they called ‘crucifixion,’ where they
would wrap your wrists to the chain
link and then they could do anything
they wanted to you. It was just ‘hazing.’
That’s all. They’d leave you there
for hours, the insects coming out,
and no ability to swat them,
and, this habit, this tradition,
this stupidity, where they’d take
old food left behind the building
in buckets just for this occasion, slop,
rotted, and pour it over your head,
into your mouth, which, I’d warn,
could cause aspiration, but nobody
listened, and it was too loud to speak
what with the B52 engines owning
the sky and I never participated, and
they came for me one night, but I ran,
into the jungle, escaped.

Bállet (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Translation of a Poem by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää)

“the North chose us”
—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää,
from “I have no beginning, no end”

An Anishinaabe elder told me once how important it is to turn off
the world, the city world, the skyscraping world, with its intense lack of colors
when you consider the multitude of greens in the forests, where the visions
wait for us, and by us I mean the indigenous, and I have spent too much of my life—
and that’s the correct phrase, a sad spending—drowned, when the woods are exquisite
and honest and real and here and now and my Saami ancestors tell us
that we should live like reindeer, become reindeer, and I am trying to become reindeer
and bear and elk and Arctic foxes and trees and rocks and fishes

and birds and birds and peace and more peace and more birds
and, when we were sane, forest-sane, we decided
that we
would marvel

at the night
in the North

the far North, where it is just us,

with the rest of the world so far in the distance, so polluting, and so strained

Sichuan (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Hussain Ahmed)

“to boil”
—Hussain Ahmed,
from “Love Story”

I was not born
in China but I was born in China. I remember the leafs
when we kissed and I remember the end,
the taxi cab driver with
his off-key karaoke as we both sat in back and neither of us would answer
the other’s questions. We met in the archived
sections of our lives. Soft legs
as thin as my mouth
and we tried to share each other’s history
and sex
but it rained
so hard that all we have left is this water.

Máttar (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Mario Meléndez)

“‘Get up, you have to come see this’”
—Mario Meléndez, as translated by Eloisa Amezcua
from “Future Memories”

for Bamewawagezhikaquay

I learned at an early
age of my Saami ancestors. My father told me
this:

that the stars
are reindeer. And then this revelation
that every so often one gets away, this thought
of falling stars
as escape, as flight,
him saying that one day I’d run across the sky.

BIO

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to IDLES’ “Danny Nedelko.”

Jordyn Pimental Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Oh!

by Jordyn Pimental

Oh!
The flora wraps
her tenderly.
Engraved her
in the ground.
Played with hair
and filled her lungs.

Oh!
Rushing and pacing
yet again.
April isn’t meant to be
so hot.
Although my heart did
quicken at the notion.

Oh!
Asked very hushed:
Is it real?
Well-versed
also pretty
enough to make up for it.
Like a picture
or a doll.

Oh!
Aging and crushing,
I’ll embark on the
patterned sea.
Not there yet
although soon.
I love you.

Doll Face

The ocean was alive and well

Life sprouted from each sea while the sun dripped down golden hair

Fitting as many seashells she could fit into the palm of her pearly hand

Now Celine went by Cel and she had evening shifts

But she didn’t always work

Once she slept amongst deep-water coral

Waking to lounge on a bed of barnacled rocks for hours

Soaking in the Pacific warmth, hours turned to centuries

And blue! It was all so beautifully blue wherever she went

A lavish year-long blue soiree with the other nymph women

They would look like ancient artwork when they danced

Once a goddess in her own right

Cel mastered the art of remembering her days with all that power

Before her shift started at eleven she’d stop by the shore

Reminiscing about her old forever

Then drooping with sorrow she’d shuffle back to the diner

Where the old men called her “doll face”

Night Bugs

As for the winged things up high
and the little worms beneath the earth
Lou hurt somewhere in between; feet planted in the herb garden.

Though none of them know
how to dream like a child.
Remembering made her fangs sprout and fur grow.

The lovage stopped growing
because it thought it was late.
Making so much shade that she attracted the night bugs.

She was a nightmare. A monster.
A female monster,
which is somehow far worse than a regular monster.

BIO

Jordyn Pimental is a college student and Massachusetts resident, often wandering. You can find her poetry and visual art in Sea Change magazine and Front Porch Review. Aside from writing and taking pictures, she enjoys finding feathers on the ground of all different shapes and colors.

Fran O’Farrell Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

Flag Day 1968

by Fran O’Farrell

The city grieves for Robert Kennedy–
city that took his life.
The bear flag flies half-staff,

but children bend like birch and will rebound.
I walk home on Beverly Boulevard,
leaving my school for the last time,

the western sky awash with gelt
at four o’clock. I pass ponies
drowsing in their barn–ponies I

am now too old to ride.
(Blaze, my favorite, is retired.)
Small shops prepare to close.

The fountain at Mount Sinai Hospital sends up
a little plume that drops like tears into
a tiled basin. My neighbor’s Tudor house

greets me as I turn onto our street; the paint flakes
from her hitching post, a man in jockey’s clothes who
lifts his hand to take a horse’s reins.

Why can’t I shift the sadness in my heart?
Weltschmerz is in me now,
a companion for all my days.

Kashmir

for Agha Shahid Ali

The Jhelum River makes paisleys
as it moves through the vale.
The waterway houses display
their saffron-colored shawls

and on a houseboat called
Abode of Love a couple waits
for the greengrocer to bring his
shikara to their door.

Tonight guns have fallen silent
on the Line of Control, and stones
once thrown in anger line
the paths of Shalimar.

If you had human form
you would be here to watch
as geldings with curled ears
graze the Fairy Meadows

and islands on Dal Lake
are towed from place to place
until, from the peak of
Nanga Parbat, they look like stars.

Moses

Once you threw your
wand in the sea
and made
a water road

leading us back
to rocky hills
where we made wine
from prickly pears.

You polished with long sleeves
sapphire tablets
until they showed
asterism

and let us rest
in law.

Sylvia at Stonehenge

West through Wiltshire
the monument appeared
and disappeared
as the road rose and fell.

She did not yet know
her world would sink
off Cornwall’s coast
like Lyonnesse.

She should have stayed
in the ring of sarsens
and slept among
the ancient stones.

A Water Burial

his brown eyes turned
to river-polished stones

his high, clear voice
became brook sounds

he came to me that night
with streaming hair

and said he’d swum the Wolf
as far as Loosahatchie Bar

before the current carried him
to God

BIO

Fran O’Farrell is a graduate of UCLA and of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fran’s work has appeared in California journals. Fran has worked as a librarian and magazine editor but is now retired and living in Los Angeles.

Paul Rabinowitz Poetry

Poetry

03/19/2025

My Ever-Changing Muse

by Paul Rabinowitz

As the morning sun brushes my face
I remember watching you on stage
white bandana woven through dark hair
swollen eyes behind spotted glasses

struggling with the measured cadence
you shade your eyes from the light
then just before the big reveal
a paralysis sets into your jaw

as the audience hangs on for the finish
an unbearable silence sets in
the DJ quickly spins Amy Winehouse
as you duck under the spotlight

you join us poets who preceded you at the bar
I ask if you’d like something special
as you untie the bandana open my book
feel your hair brush my cheek and whisper

Your work moved me

and thought how Amy must have felt
alone on stage under the spotlight
endlessly interrogated by her fans
as she floated away on scattered debris

cheating herself someone might throw a lifeline
instead they screamed for another song
about arrows piercing her heart
bloodstains on the bathroom floor

especially the endings

so when the sun on my face becomes too much
I set last night’s images in order for my next poem
head to the kitchen to make coffee
and find a scribbled note to wake you early

this one’s my favorite

and like I’ve been doing since the beginning
I heat the milk and blend the sugar
that special way you’ve always liked
sweetness inevitably rising to the top

Trapped

This morning
after a week of torrential rains
sitting alone in the garden
watching hundreds of perennials
burst into glimmering clusters
of pink and orange
I trap a memory

walking the perimeter
of a desert crater
I come across
a single flower
pushing through
clay and sandstone

when a small bird
lands on the arm
of my Adirondack chair
its head twitching
as if curious
about why a lost memory
from a distant land
without context
or association
suddenly appears

Yet every detail
of the single desert flower
is clear
like my reflection
in the puddle
at the edge of my feet

and without warning
a spectacular bolt of lighting
charges across the sky

your face appears
crying for help
as I run
down the escarpment
tumbling over
smoldering rocks

the small bird
tilts its head
flies to another perch
under a verdant canopy
protected from predators
as I let go
to find you there

BIO

Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, The Montreal Review and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020, Mud Season Review in 2022, Apricity in 2023, Rappahannock Review in 2024 and Woven Take Press, 2025. He is the author of 5 books including his latest book of short stories called Syncopated Rhythms due out in 2025. Rabinowitz’s poems and fiction are the inspiration for 8 award winning experimental films, including Best Experimental Short at Cannes, Venice Shorts Film Festival, Oregon Short Film Festival and The Paris Film Festival.

For more about Paul: paulrabinowitz.com

Todd Sformo Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

A Fine Line

by Todd Sformo

Smooth wings of a plane lift: lift’s in the corrugated, dragonfly wing-stroke. Strange, that order of thought—the former manufactured, the latter evolution, the first precise, the second chaotic. Yet, their maneuverings! Under the skin, airplane wings hold regularly spaced spars running the length, and perpendicular ribs give rise to airfoil. A broken wing in a junkyard, without other clues, is distinct enough to say Cessna (genus?) 152 (species?). The veins in wings in dragonflies are windows to species, too, but are given such stolid, architecturally stiff names, “arculus,” “nodus,” “antenodal,” seemingly at odds with an emerald’s metallic patrol over ponds, its vapory phosphorescent eyes leading the charge and leaving behind sparks from thoracic stripes, like little lightning strikes, chimes in a distant wind.

As a mechanic learns stringers and struts, I studied wing venation, back and forth between textbook and specimen, memorizing veins from leading to trailing edge: costa and sub-costa, radius, media, cubitus, and anal. Not Melville-exciting, but then the “rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous” lie in shape veins make as they fork and branch into discoidal fields: polygons arch into hexagons, square into pentagons, propagating constellations; rectangles cross into kite, as tattered wings dangle into Mondrian edge-off triangles. And among its venous tracery, cellophane chitin spans this cathedral’s stained glass—devoid of color—except for the smoky pterostigmata.

I viewed them under the microscope, the wings of Odonata, Anisoptera, and drew their network on rainy days when no insects flew. Veins were in my vision as I walked from lab to home, spotting the hind wings of the four-spotted skimmer Libellula quadrimaculata in the heaving cracks of concrete, a dead-ringer for the map of Italy; outlines in asphalt of a lake darner’s arculus, while checks in slate sketch the nodus-taper in Hudsonia, a boreal whiteface. Pavement fractures are etched with spilled cherry syrup, the latticework of meadowhawks’ reddish wings.

Species of crack, but more crack than kind, and I wondered whether I could discover venation out there as asterisms of a priori wings. My eyes were drawn to cracks as lines that are not things but a lack, de-fining. That a crack does not exist gives rise to absurdity, but we’re saved by tenth grade geometry that comes to life, where line and point delineate a mind’s dot without the flesh of lead. If a crack is not, and a line is no thing, yet has the ability to take sides where none previously existed, is it, itself, creation from nothing?

On the black lab bench, I accidentally brush my elbow against a wing I had previously cut off and lost track of. The veins stick to my clammy skin as I drag it over the edge, watching, almost awfully, the detached wing glide in a slow, monster arc, balanced, horizontal, imperceptibly losing altitude—no struggle, no whirly-gig spasm, no tumble, just doing what a wing is supposed to. Under the complete absence of control

It Does Not Follow

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my drive to work, destination, a point unremarkably fixed, and I, as if on autopilot, wonder after the fact what I saw along the way.

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my first amusement park—Fantasy Island—where I got syrupy legs after eating rock candy then cotton, where masquerade parades without mask in a sudden western town, complete with porch barrel, louvre doors, and a cow, as we watch the lone sheriff draw momentary death, until dead cowboys get up and bow. In an outlandish house because it didn’t have fiendish figures popping up or nozzles flush to the floor spouting an air jet up your pant leg, my voice and hearing got trapped in tiny porous pits in a dining room plush with egg carton walls. By the end of the day, I no longer effortlessly grasped by ineffable thought but slogged on hands and feet the buckling of tidy corridors, straight railings with unsightly twists, giant siblings and shrunken parents. Within easy reach of an exit, on flat floorboards, my knees were the seat of wisdom, telling me I’m walking uphill.

That profile of two faces creating a vase (although this is not a vase and these are not faces) is Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909). A painting’s frame and converging point roughly form a pyramid, with apex tucked inside. A moment’s attention is all that’s required to scan for linear perspective, focusing imperceptibly on a vanishing speck—good ole 3-D (on a 2-D surface, of course). Picasso constructs a contrary, while my mind’s momentum still searches for the Renaissance, reversing converging lines culminating in a new apex outward, toward the viewer, who becomes the vanishing point, drawing attention to what is supposed to be and the wrong that is.

The profile of every thing must be the contour of some thing else? When dusky, or in low light just in bed, eyes not fully adjusted, or looking out from the balcony of a church in winter, when stained glass is black from the lack of sunlight and the illumination by the artificial is too slight, I’ve had moments when light itself changes before my eyes, and no one else notices—no heads turn, no confused faces. It’s not some sign, though, some communication (which would have been nice), but something about me. I made light flicker without light flickering. Staring into a bathroom mirror, I test my pupils and think I can make them move.

My eyes have been in the corner of rooms at intersection of ceiling and walls, an out-of-eye experience, where corneas’ roundness bump into interior’s limits. This trapping room makes me feel big not claustrophobic, but I’ve been in rooms where the mapping is pathologic. With a walker holding her weight, she led and murmured—“microphones”; her finger silence-arcing from lip toward light points on fork and faucet—“phones”; coruscating Vermeer blotches on brassy doorknobs and glassy edges—“bugs,” as we, indubitably, swept through her apartment, shadowing the glare-tropes that pursued us. We were the sun and the flowers.

BIO

Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, working on a variety of Arctic organisms such as fish, bowhead whales, and the freshwater mold Saprolegnia. He has a PhD and MS in biology, an MFA in creative writing, an MA in art history, and a BA in philosophy. Besides publishing scientific papers, he has published prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran, Interalia Magazine, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Fulbright Arctic Initiative 2018-2019) and Alaska Literary Award (2024) in Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation.

Sarah McNamara Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

His Shirt Pocket

by Sarah McNamara

I stared at his shirt pocket filled with pens and folded pieces of paper. He looked from me to his pocket and back to me. He smiled and pushed air through his teeth—a laugh, a sigh, maybe both. I could tell you if I looked into his eyes. Everything he doesn’t say is written in his eyes. I wonder why people carry around more than one pen. I’d like to shrink to the size of one and sit in his shirt pocket. He’d chat with me all day. He likes to talk, he’s good at it. Sometimes we just look at each other—our eyes ordinary, our mouths closed. He’s nice to look at, like a forest of deciduous trees, no matter the season.

Instructional Guide for Handling a Crush

Barrel through the train’s cars (he’ll glide out of the way to avoid a collision). Say thank you, but don’t make eye contact (he’ll reply like he knows you). Look at him in disbelief. Resist the urge to grab him and hug him. Say something bright and agreeable. Find an empty seat. Anticipate his face every afternoon. Smile at his enthusiastic quips. When he disappears, anticipate his face and quips for one week (maybe two) before conceding. Invoke him every day. Stand on the trains with your head in a book. Glance at everyone who stands opposite you until he returns.

BIO

Sarah McNamara’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Ink In Thirds and 101 Words. Find her at sarahrosemcnamara.blogspot.com

Chris Callard Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

The Fire

by Chris Callard

It all went up in the fire.

The photos, the chairs, the clothes, the loves,

the work, the flirting with greatness.

Tinged memories, ash-fringed heart.

Embers mocking jabberwocky smoke.

Breathing haze for days.

Fly me to the moon, all the earthly glamor hammered,

smudged mud after the hoses were through.

Crackling sound resonates,

a roundabout due for incineration.

It came, it’s gone, all of it, consumed.

Blow the residue from your nose,

sneeze cleansingly.

And so it goes.

Sharing

My dad shared wistfully that he learned French kissing

as a teen from his older sister.

A 1940s vibe.

After an up and down life, stressful, too eventful,

She had her heart attack.

He stopped by for his check-in and found her on the floor.

911 said give mouth to mouth.

He knew she was gone but could not ignore the professional advice.

Useless, of course, unfortunate, as well.

When he told the story later there was no wistful sentimentality.

Just a sense of oddity.

Strange sibling bookends, sad, sweet, earthy, innocent at 70.

A family tale, remembered by few, now shared again.

Snoring

Your skin is so moving, its kindness so full.

You wondered, said hello,

said you liked this snugly.

You knew, though, how

far past due I was.

Still, a lovely gesture to make.

Why do I say goodbye so boorishly

when I adored your snoring?

BIO

Chris Callard lives in Long Beach, CA. His poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, Witcraft, Cadence Collective, and One Sentence Poems. His short fiction has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Witcraft, Ariel Chart, Gemini Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, A Story in 100 Words, and ZZyZxWriterZ. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions.

Daniel Meltz Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

Last Edit Was Seconds Ago

by Daniel Meltz

Used to be a bungee life off a rusted bridge on a paisley
river named a superfund site during the Carter
administration. Used to be bouts of vertigo and
homewrecking and acid trips on the railroad tracks and
la-di-da books about gravedigging and identity

swapping and shoplifting The Bell Jar at the Brentano’s
in the Village that’s now a Duane Reade. But then I
tomahawked the bungee cord and sproinged like a rock
from a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk slingshot onto lower
Second Av where that notorious hotspot the Saint used to

be, marked by a grease stain in the shape of a gunned-
down body. Every part of me was busted but I still had
the high-pitched bizzbuzz of Yessir or Nosir against my
swollen intellect which echoed through a decommissioned
subway station where a corporal played Taps on a plastic

trumpet. If only I had the one word, be it strength or
emergency or anything as big and unmistakable as that
to snap me out of stupendous stupors, but as soon as the
word seemed to fit the situation it escaped through a
nostril so I discontinued talismanic buzzwords and realized

that if I wanted to stick around I’d have to get professional
help and return to the vocabulary at some point. That
some point is now. And though the word was changing
up until yesterday (words like connect and proportion and
father) the forever word is easy now, it’s kindness.

Lost and Found and Lost Again and Again

Sometimes it’s better to have the upper hand and sometimes
it’s not and sometimes there are no hands to be had in the first
place.

Sometimes someone is always apologizing or overdosing on
Lexapro, full of what Gertrude Stein classified as “servant girl
being.”

Sometimes it’s best to spread love like mulch though it nauseates
firmer temperaments but in the long run inhibits crabgrass from
spreading.

Sometimes it’s best for the snarky to dominate so that the nicer learn
to dish it back and polish a sense of independence that lurks within a
dependent nature.

And the ones with no hands to speak of: Invite them over, they mingle
so effortlessly, although they don’t necessarily make good bosses, yet
they’re so perfect for

each other when they marry each other that, even if one of them dies,
they will marry again because their love life never made them feel
inadequate.

I cannot lie that I like it when your personality changes and you look at me
with a dreamy curiosity as if to say Who is the real unknowable you that can
make me feel guilty.

Bogota New Jersey

                      whoever is stable thats the
                      one to go to everyones
                      got a hope and a secret
                      holdover that comes at you
                      like a grumpy rugrat or
                      retreats from you like a
                      nurse with bad breath
                      oh Lizzie of the sacred
                      snow day sledding down
                      through the intersection
                      of hearts sliced thin I was
                      putting myself together with
                      masking tape and an attitude
                      so worried about the
                      marauding carthieves though
                      I dont own a car this
                      barn these hands at 2 and
                      10 wake up resting mommy
                      and renegotiate with the
                      mediator who is sorrier
                      than a cannibal of all
                      that rope on a poopdeck
                      of weather-beaten rigmarole
                      and a holy I don’t know

Israelites Delivered unto Freedom in Two Kinds of Hebrew

By staying with you as long as I did I guess you could say I got left back 38
times meaning I could’ve wound up age 47 and still in fourth grade but
if it had taken that long to learn long division I still would’ve ended up
knowing how to divide and continued on to fractions. I didn’t divide. I

split. I miss you. I will never forget the
lessons you taught me though I was
such a bad patient for so many years,
so resistant to your help, so addicted
to false enthusiasm and reflecting
plastic surfaces, that at one point you
told me A lot of therapists would’ve
dumped you by now, would’ve told
you you’re unworkable, but lucky
for you I am not one of those
therapists. (What a lesson right there,
a lesson in sassy-ass.) Because all

I’d been saying was no, to whatever observations you offered.
Observations that scalded like cast iron skillets with kidneys
and livers still sizzling in the fat. You said I was sneaky and
petty and snooty and vengeful and smirky and smug and
condescending. How did you expect me to respond to all
those switchblade descriptors? But I hung around anyway.

I had a tiny uncrazy reasonability
in me. It knew your approach was
necessary, fortified, Molotov, en-
dangered. It knew I couldn’t snow
or guilt you. You even warned me
early on that I shouldn’t mistake
you for one of those bleeding-
heart social workers. And besides.

For every thousand or so of my petulant nos, a yes would pop out
of me, freely espoused. And every yes thereof came pressure-
tested, credible, a steel-inforced tulip, in the order of operations,
in the number brought down after subtracting for the remainder.
Yes, I want to suffer. Yes, it’s wrong to cocktease. Yes, I want
to watch you eat dirt. Okay, Mr. Twist-O-Flex. What comes next?

Moving away from you. Learning
to release you. Understanding
how long ago you released me.
Knowing the difference between
repressed bellicosity and catalyst
combos such as independent
thinking, throwing wet clay on a
pottery wheel and (now that we’ve
memorized the poem Moses
sang when he split the Red Sea)
I scratched the table behind my wager.

BIO

Daniel Meltz‘s first book of poems, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” will be published by Trail to Table Press in February 2025. David Sedaris is calling the book “funny, bold and moving.” His first novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State,” will be published by Rattling Good Yarns in April 2025. His individual poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2012, Salamander, upstreet and lots of other journals. He’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist in competitions held by seven independent presses. He’s a retired technical writer and teacher of the deaf, has a BA in English from Columbia (no honors) and lives in Manhattan. https://www.danielmeltz.com/

Kristina Lynn Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

The Collector

by Kristina Lynn

You collect my tears on your palm
like fireflies

and wipe them on your jeans.
The warm moisture smears

into the denim.
I lift my chin and see only

darkness that threatens
to swallow.

There are no stars here,
no cool breeze

playing us for fools
who ditch our jackets.

We are the tall order
that heightens enemy ground,

that escalates wind
into a cyclone;

we are not the Centennial,
glass eyes still shining—

You no longer wish
to lob dice

at the swimming pool.
And still,

I fill my pockets
with stale pennies.

Bottom Feeder

When you jammed your tongue down my throat,
                      When you pried the gaping hole open
and peered,
                      I could barely suppress my elation,
watching the way you mechanically pushed
                      yourself forward,
your Roman nose jutting into my nostrils,
                      your fish lips puckered to suck
in—between fascination and revulsion, I counted
                      your array of spidery lashes, I
counted the constellation of indentations
                      in your skin, I counted on
the precipice of euphoria preparing
                      its heart to eulogize me—Will
the neck turn? When the impact landed,
                      When you nudged me onto my side
and smashed my face into the walls
                      of our one-way aquarium,
I could barely suppress my admiration,
                      feeling for the way
you clumsily pitched yourself forward,
                      your crude fingers
pawing for the lever by my earlobe,
                      your flat ventrals hoisted in midair to flop
in—between reflections of your sleek celestial body,
                      I counted the pitching blackness, I
counted the galaxies swimming
                      in your nebular eyes, I counted
on this far-extending silence to divulge
                      the breadth of the cosmos—
The neck turns;
                      Will it feed when the body sinks?

We Regroup in the Kitchen

Your green eyes play too much—
or are they blue?

Your long legs wide-step
over to me,

you dart around the question
like a minnow.

In the kitchen, I cut
celery and try to peel

my eyes back so I can
really see you—

I make the wet, open holes like a dartboard;
hit them with a double ring

and I’ll abhor you.
You can never land on

what you really want.
My brother says

you’re looking for an ocean
in a landlock,

and I’m the bathwater
you’ll slowly cling to—

is there a door
for us,

Is there a door?
I’ll forget that I can swim

if you can swear
you won’t be the millstone.

Up to my neck
I’ll immerse,

refuse to square up—
you linger; 6 days

and counting

Until It’s Over

I imagine you
standing on the ceiling

when he says
Never once

for you
were always fond of fixtures,

the bleeding heart
still faithfully churning

dead air. He
lets loose the screen door behind him

and I throw my neck out
for the swift swing

still lands
though there’s no one to see it.

See this:
the inch that spares no detail

four thick thighs
on the outdoor swing.

We breathed in time
with the swaying,

and he turned his neck to whisper
when he was through

with shouting. I imagine
you are the fingers

scraping this hollowed-out,
protruded-gut feeling,

if I sit, silent
maybe he’ll hear me

and the ceiling will begin
to unfold

like a daydream. Still
the sun bears down on us

and I bend my left leg
to feel

closer; Tap my shin
until it’s over.

BIO

Kristina Lynn is a writer originally from the Garden State. She recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and has had work published in Eunoia Review and Bulb Culture Collective. She has work forthcoming in Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

Alan Brayne Poetry

Poetry

12/21/2024

ON MY BALCONY, NOVEMBER

by Alan Brayne

The moon hangs heavy tonight,
A ball of thickened yellow
Dripping treacle onto the sea.
It’s not a night
For fairy wings, or things
That are lighter than air,
Butterflies and feathers of mythical birds,
Thoughts that may take flight.

A cruise ship glitters vulgar
On the horizon, two strips of lights
Slice starkly through the darkness
With blatant bonhomie; I imagine
Boozy faces, balloons and party hats,
Tunes smooth as maple syrup,
A clumsy, groping dance.

And here am I, alone.
Yet, truth to tell, I cannot say
I’m lonely, there’s a loneliness
Greater than this: a feeling that faces
Are masks, that bodies may edge close
But must not touch, an intimacy
Of distance.

The lazy moon floats higher
In the sky, but as its colour pales,
Strangely it glows warm. The cruise ship
Has moved on. The sky is wild with stars
And, foolish as it may be,
I let my lips catch butterflies
Which my eyes only see

NEU!

It’s new! It’s new!
But by tomorrow the shine
Will have dulled, and grizzled old men
Will explain what it all means.
Bright young things, meanwhile,
Will pose in peacock chairs
In virtual nightclubs,
The newest, glossiest peacocks on the scene.

Everything’s preserved now, so
Everything is swallowed
In obscurity, history held hostage
In a cage with intangible bars.
Old-time music plays
On an endless loop, an endless loop
With a beat that repeats and repeats,
But nobody hears.

Everything’s preserved now, so
History conjures from its cage
A range of ancient new toys,
And a raga or a Javanese gamelan
Floats drowsy like opium poppies
Over yesterday’s strawberry fields.
So rest in peace, my bright young things,
Amid your newest noise.

THE SKIN OF VIRGINS

The doctor has a glass eye
And a needle. “Inoculation time,”
He announces, with a grin, “All the feckless poor
Must take the serum.”

The wedding cake stands ten tiers high.
Delicate fingers slice into it,
Delicate mouths peck nimbly
At strawberry icing.

Tuxedos and awards, flashbulbs,
Pats on backs, loud celebration. The boffins
Who mixed this latest elixir of youth
Are allowed to watch from the door.

The Countess bathes in blood
To smooth her wrinkles; she can smell
The skin of virgins on her skin. How dare
They have been so young?

The poor will always be with us,
We say; we never mention
The rich. I guess we’re scared
Of the needle.

EUROPE 2023

Hush now, little dolls,
Don’t make even a peep:
Daddy’s polishing his medals
And mustn’t be disturbed.

And everyone loves Daddy,
Tin soldier in his uniform,
Whose punishments
Are just a form of love.

Mommy’s busy gossiping
Over the fence: she eyes the gem
Around her neighbour’s neck,
The neighbour she’ll later betray.

Fear or love.

Fear or love,
It’s all the same
In these games
Of heroes and villains.

The dolls gather at their windows:
Daddy mounts his horse
And strides the street,
Mommy flashes her jewels.

Six million slabs of meat
And we’ve learned nothing.

THE NORMAL FOLK

It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
The alarm clocks that go off at six,
The prissy little lawns, the spice jars
In a row.

The people too genteel
To brandish pitchforks, yet
In their nightly hallucinations
Jackals howl, bodies get dismembered,
Their lawns seep blood.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to be watchful
Because under the cloak of darkness
Shadows are stealing their spice jars,
They check their fence.

It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
Decency dressed in Sunday best,
The doorbell playing Mozart, the photos
In the hall.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to stand firm
Because otherwise the shadows
Will disconnect their doorbell,
They stand up, they salute,
And they obey.

It’s only normal.

BIO

Alan Brayne is a retired teacher and lecturer from England now living in Malta. He recently self-published a book of poems, fiction and essays, Digging for Water. The author of three novels set in Indonesia: Jakarta Shadows, Kuta Bubbles, and Lombok Flames. Interests include art, film noir, the I Ching, philosophy, and walking. Just recovered from working out how to set up my website: alanbrayne.com

*all poems appear in Digging for Water

Robert Hill Long Poetry

09/19/2024

ALBA

by Robert Hill Long

Begin with a woman in her doorway—
nightgown and loose robe, the spill
of light from her living room. It’s still less day
than night. Fog scrims the hills,

muffles the black surf below. She looks west.
Wherever she touches a hand
to her body—forehead, cheek, breast—
is a wing applied to a wound.

In the doorway’s dim parenthesis
she lets out ghosts, to burn off
like the fog. There’s no kiss
better than the sun’s; it will come soon enough.

And you, why are you watching her? The woman
facing you is a door. Wake up. Go in.

HANA COAST

In rain, the doves don’t call. Let
the Pacific resume its master narrative—
they blink away the details. Around each eye

a lapis ring chains sky
to sea. They utter a rivulet
of distances, yet live

at your feet. After the flood they flew
here because better than
any surviving thing they heard converging

waves of blue upon black upon blue,
moon upon sun upon moon.
They are the perfecting

of that echo. Their wings in the grass
that buoys your feet are rainclouds. Let them pass.

COMPLICITY

Trailing coastal rubbernecks, she descended
into a cave vibrant with the roar
of breakers and sea lions. Her eyes
stung with salt wrack, bodies black

as torpedoes made of fishmeal and bilge-water.
Once it was a sanctuary; marketing sleaze
made it a zoo. The adults avoided eye contact;
pups stared, refugees behind wire. She ended

her part by turning away. But she
had paid her fraction for the upkeep of this
franchise crowded as the bowels of a slave ship
turned amusement ride. She came up to the clean kiss

of sky, stepped into the road and was nearly hit
by a truck hauling the trunk of a redwood tree.

IMPLORE

Kill me in the water or kill me on the sand.
Kill me among the spruces on the cliff.
She was praying in a church without roof
or walls, crying hard. She could not stand.

In the zigzag of dead things at tideline
she sank. Kill me with sky black with rain
or cold blue going black and empty.
But she did not push her way into the sea.

Hard, hard to pierce the perpetual
noise at the edge of the world. The cold ache
in her knees was telling her to break,
break. No, she was not whole or well

but her fingers held one another, aware
that she was asking to live forever.

BIO

Robert Hill Long has published 6 books and won numerous awards, prizes and fellowships—including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Raised in North Carolina, he was founding director of the NC Writers Network, and afterward taught in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

He lives with his wife Linn Van Meter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.