Home Poetry

Setting Sun

by Cynthia Pratt



Time as it turns into,
what, a noose, a lock
with no key?  Here,
a list: braggart, turnstile,
a shopping list with missing
items, family, no family.

What do you want when
time creeps in through
shadow doors and there
you are; you turned into
a doorknob that never
opens.  Let me explain.
This age thing we fell up
against flattened you
into the soil that once
was my life.  Now,

it’s my turn, soon
because the sun moves
across the sky drawing
me into longer, thinner
shadows—first my legs
stretch out, then my torso.
My arms lean down to
the earth; my head extends
like a rod reaching for
the horizon.  I surprise
myself when each morning
I awake, thinner and thinner
but breathing steadily
into an unknown sunset.



Defining Want



Think of the intransitive,
that of being needy or destitute,
to feel need, to desire to come,
or go or be. Think of where to,
where from, of what, in this
definition. Or maybe to fail to
possess, the ardent yearning
to covet. Oh, my hunger,
I pine, salivate, lust for this
sin, this ache more now
then ever in my youth,
that time so many years ago.



BIO

Cynthia Pratt is one of the founding members of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board which has been in existence for 35 years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Raven Chronicles, Feminist Theology Poetry, The RavensPerch, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Humana Obscura, Kestrel Journal, Sad Girl Diaries, among other publications, and in six anthologies, including Washington Humanities and Empty Bowl Press, I Sing the Salmon Home (2023). She also has poems in three other upcoming anthologies, including Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds. Her manuscript, Celestial Drift¸ was published in 2016. Her manuscript, That Wild Knocking, is forthcoming in 2026 through Finishing Line Press. She is a former Lacey Councilmember and Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey. She is the first Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022. She reads too many murder mysteries and talks to birds.

Website: Cynthia-pratt-poet.net







This is What the Moon Whispers at Midnight

by Erika Seshadri



I am
betrothed to the tide
through darkness and light
in consequence of
eras, epochs
eons

Over millennia
I’ve watched the argosy
sail forth in brine and solitude
brimming bow to stern
with hiraeth

I’ve witnessed
this century’s secrets
flow like water through gills of
ancient Greenland sharks
to be buried ever
deeper

I move
stony-faced, inured
as ruthless hundred-year storms
rage in succession—
one right after
another

You’ve prayed
for withering waves
among this contrition for decades
but you won’t find
forgiveness
in the sea

Though its rising
is of no concern to me,
I must say, it looks like you could be in trouble now



How Far They’ve Come



when the refugees arrive
let us wash their feet
tenderly
so we can know
how far they’ve come
to stand where we stand,
each tremulous soul.
let us place around their necks
lockets grown from
softness, bursting
with heartbeats
yours, mine, theirs

like brothers and sisters,
mothers and fathers

then we will
flatten our feet
and refuse to become soldiers
until our voices wither
and we become un-



BIO

Erika Seshadri lives in Lamy, NM. She is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Her first book, HIMALAYAN TSUNAMI (Memoir; Austin Macauley Publishers; Erika & Niranjan Seshadri), won a 2024 BookFest Award and is currently being adapted for film.







The Marine Biologist

by Kevin Dwyer


for Adan Quinn


“And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life.”
—Donald Barthelme, “The School”



I remember vividly the humidity
my skin soaked like sugar cane

the dollar twenty-five I gave the ice cream lady in quarters

how I managed my way ‘round the truck
how I readied myself to cross

the split second screech

the woman in the car
rattling her hands

our screen door

I remember my mother sprinting
sobbing in a Spanish dialect that was not yet accustomed to speaking English

her eyes filled with tears that seemed to run for eternity

telling her I dropped my ice cream in the street
the comfort of her suffocating love

I remember running to and from the public library a couple blocks from home

my white soles blackened by asphalt
reading book after book about the depths of our oceans

knowing only three-fourths of the words

my nose pressed against the pages
the smell of mothballs

I remember the pressure in my ears when I swam deeper down in my pool

reflecting on the hidden planet inside our own
its embryonic peacefulness

how we’ve had yet to reach its bottom

I remember running outside after it rained
studying puddles of murk rainwater

what seemed to be galaxies of tadpoles

filling a mason jar to the rim
running to the bayou

dumping them with the universe of others

infinite amounts of tadpoles
repeating that for hours

the exact steps

‘til my mother’s voice echoed through the oak trees
blood orange sun reflected off the bayou

every puddle was empty



Valhalla 2/3/15


“What we have here is: we have a mosaic” –
National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Robert Sumwalt



nobody knows why
that gate
that arm
those caution lights at the crossing
those lights caution flashing
39 seconds
those seconds flashing
flashing seconds
flashing
that arm
that gate
lowering
later
seconds
later
late
pressed on the back
on back
back
of her car
between the track and the other side

but not on the track

she got out and looked at what was holding her back
touched that gate
how calm she was
she
that gate
touching
she did not panic
she did not hurry
how calm she was
even though both gates were down

she looked directly at me
directly
and me
I motioned her to come back
I don’t know if she could see me
my headlights on
flashing
on
those seconds
flashing
instead she got back inside
she got back inside
got back inside
back inside
inside
instead
and pulled forward
onto the track

perhaps she thought she had more time

but what about the horn,
no louder than a blender
or someone shouting
then suddenly
louder than an ambulance
sounding
seconds
sounding
more
sounding
more
seconds

perhaps she thought she had more time

he doesn’t remember hearing the horn or the bells of that train
though he did see the flashing
those bright whites piercing through the red
the panting
that gate
that arm
sounding

a terrible crunching,
terrible
crunching
crunch
sounding

and just like that,
the car was gone,

was
there was no way she could have known what hit her
just like that
gone
the car
back
sounding
then an explosion
fireball
was
sounding
flames
just like that
from the train
from the front
fuel-fumed
flaming

holding his head in his hands
she was there
then she was gone
there and gone
there and
there
there and gone
and gone
gone
was
in an instant
she
gone
was
gone
sounding

he did everything he could,

perhaps she thought she had more time




The Linstock Castle ring[1]



restless hoofs
the rise and fall of music
sweet journey adornment

the rise and fall of music
dancing as freezing water

fierce horns in combat
comfort each decree

the day ruptures luminous
an atom discharge of men
in troops of water

sweet journey adornment
the rise and fall of music
dancing as freezing water

rest at ease among the immeasurable
an atom discharge of men
in troops of water

blowing sorrow
in troops of water
restless hoofs
rowing endless across the land

over a misty passage
restless hoofs

splendid applause unbroken
an atom discharge of men
over a misty passage
restless hoofs

narrow heart in time
an atom discharge of men
in troops of water




A bone amulet carved in the shape of a rib from Lindholm, Skane, Sweden[2]



restless discourse of hoofs  lightning livid  restless discourse of hoofs  riding beyond  a miry place  long enduring tossing troops  divine mouth  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  divine mouth  [eating affliction]  a miry place  long enduring tossing troops  divine mouth  sustenance of exiles  divine mouth  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  wrapping storms  divine mouth  night-cloud covenant  restless discourse of hoofs  lightning livid  divine mouth  :

[3]divine mouth, divine mouth  divine mouth  divine mouth  divine mouth  divine mouth  divine mouth  divine mouth  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  seizing wounded swans within the marsh  hearken the hearts of our offspring  hearken the hearts of our offspring  hearken the hearts of our offspring  reaching up to touch a crown of boughs  giving themselves up to the deserted maw  glorious trumpet  night-cloud covenant  night-cloud covenant  night-cloud covenant  :  divine mouth  long enduring tossing troops  glorious trumpet  :

[1] Ring made of agate. Page takes the inscription to be a corrupt version of the engraving on the Kingmoor and Bramham Moor rings (An Introduction to English Runes (2nd ed) 112). The location where this ring was found is unrecorded, but Page suggests that it is identical to a ring found at Linstock Castle in 1773 (112).

[2]Found in 1840 in Skåne, Sweden, while cutting peat from a bog. This cut the bone in half and resulted in the destruction of one rune in the second line of text. The sequence in the second line contains a magical string of runes.

[3] The runes here mirror the runes of the first stanza.



BIO

Kevin Dwyer is a Catholic high school educator, inspiring his students to read and write passionately. He earned his Honors BA from Saint Louis University, MA from Fordham University, and is completing his PhD at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Kevin’s chapbook, broadsides, and poems can be found at Yellow Flag Press and MockingHeart Review.

You can connect with Kevin on Instagram at instagram.com/Kdwizzle







A BELONGING

by Juanita Rey



It’s windy outside
just the way the rattling trash cans like it.
Curtains shake.
Window rattles.
A pen rolls off the table,
onto the floor.
The noise startles me.
But it’s not about fear.
Just the dubious nature of my life here.

Mice scamper through the walls.
Spiders crisscross the ceiling.
Shadows steal half the floor,
then my leg up to the knee.
A friend I have not seen in years
appears to me in this kitchen
of all places.
It’s amazing how creative
light and dust can get
when they have my memories
as a model.
But, of course, it will be totally dark soon.
She cannot stay.

I’m reading a book in English.
I feel proud of that for some reason.
But it makes me a little less Dominican
and no more American than I was before.

Then my neighbor from the apartment below
knocks on my door.
She says she thought
she heard somebody home.
That’s not altogether encouraging
but it’s a start.




THE TAINO MOON



The sun sinks into the sea
but the moon is another kind of rising,
like the lilt of a song but without the sound,
a drum-less palo, a choir of departing gulls.
It has the air, the breezy cadence of a fateful moment
but, as I head towards home, it turns perfect.

The lights ahead are a human constellation,
the public eyes of the ones who make do,
most inside now, concluding this day
in the manner of all days, the light
nudged westward, the dark overseer,
and the old moon of the Taino,
held over for these times.




POEM TO THE WORD “NO”



Why is someone’s tongue
forcing its way into my mouth?

My legs are curled up
so I push back with my hands.

How many ways can I say “No.”
If the word’s not heard,
it must get physical.
Thankfully, “No” has muscle.

I want to believe
that life is about the choices I make –
good or bad –
and not what other people want of me.

Thankfully, he leaves –
first, out of my mouth
then through the door.



BIO

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet, US resident. Her work has been published in Mixed Mag, The Mantle, The Lincoln Review, Lion and Lilac, amongst others.







ADIRONDACKS IN FALL

by John Grey



The great bird forest
sheds its red and gold feathers;
on the trail through the woodland
they alight
as soft as palms patting
the heads of babies;
across the pond
where a few leaves float
like crinkled lily-pads,
a beaver slips
from shore to dam
with kindling in its teeth;
the breeze blows cool
and the dead descend,
from a sun
now even farther afield,
light pulling away
from weary trees
grown tired of growth;
free of civilization,
I needn’t recognize
a single aspect of myself.




TUBES TIED



She had her tubes tied at 35.
Too many failed pregnancies.
Too much anticipation
bleeding on the kitchen floor.
She confessed it to the priest.

His response was garbled.
She retreated into a dozen
half-hearted “hail Marys”,
and fingers wrapped tight
around rosary beads.

But her body would
never fool her again.
It would be the provenance
of sickness and disease
and nothing more.

No more exhaustion by hope.
None of that doptone
on her stomach
listening for ghosts.

From now on,
if she isn’t feeling good,
the reason’s simple.
There is no good to feel.



HAWK


So the bird you feed
is killed by the hawk you didn’t see coming.

You put the seed on the tray.
You hung it from the oh so visible branch.
You watched as birds descended in their numbers.
You took advantage of their hunger.
You invited the victims in.

And then you stared in horror
as the huge predator dropped down
and gripped a startled starling in its talons,
snapped its neck,
flew up to a rooftop,
and devoured its flesh,
spit out the feathers and bone.

But you still feed the birds.
You watch their antics from your window.
And they still sing between mouthfuls,
get in their thanks
before your return as a hawk.




DEGREES OF SEPARATION ANYONE?



For me to be with Angela,
I had to meet a man
who introduced me to his cousin
whose best friend worked
at a bookstore I was unaware existed
which I began to frequent
on a regular basis
where I found myself
one Tuesday evening
side by side with a
young woman in the
“American History” section
who invited me to
a gathering of herself
and a number of like-minds
at a nearby coffee shop
where I began chatting
to another young woman
who, after a date or two,
felt like it wouldn’t work
between us but that
her younger sister and myself
were a much more likely couple.
And, here we are, years later,
and I run into that man
I met way back,
and I neither thank him
nor blame the guy
for my current situation
because it would be
too complicated,
too convoluted to explain,
and, as for the younger sister
of the woman I dated
who was part of gathering
of like-minds
in a coffee shop
that I became temporarily
involved with
thanks to another woman
I met in the “American History”
section of a bookstore
where worked this best friend
of the cousin of the guy
I met way back
and had just run into
for the first time in years –
her name wasn’t Angela.
No, Angela was the lovely woman
the man is out walking with.
This is where my story
really begins.



BIO

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review, and Flights.







no hallelujahs anywhere

by Allen Seward



I’m sorry to say that I
have no hallelujahs for you
and I haven’t had a single one
since
my high school days
those strange days

back then
in those days
like that

there were hallelujahs everywhere
you couldn’t step outside without
seeing one
or getting hit by one

you couldn’t back out of the driveway
without running one over

but that was way back then

in that strange past
when I was trained for just that
to see hallelujahs everywhere

but that was way back then

and I haven’t seen any since,

thank
God.



no more words



no more bit fingertips,
no more cut wrists.

if these rivers wish to be free
then I
will piss them out
and smile as I flush it all down the drain.

it is time for a great change.

this has done me no good
and frankly I can’t stand it.
I wish to put it all away
and never look at it again.

there you have it.

no more.

no more words. it is finished. kaput.
let the silence and empty space take me.
so be it.

no more fingertips. no more wrists.
no more rivers. no more words.



poking the happy side of life



ready yourself for the barrage
of stone
of glass
of arrow
of bullet
of knife,

ready-or-not, they do not care,

the order has come down
and you have been found guilty
or near-enough to be guilty,
adjacent, parallel,

it does not matter,

the balloon will pop
and no longer be a balloon
and spill everywhere
and not be cleaned up
and scraps will blow with the wind
and the rest will dry,

ready yourself,

you have been adjacent to meaning
for your entire life, parallel to it,
near-enough but not touching,
you have intersected with nothing,
and yet here it comes,

summer is over,

ready yourself.



complex



it has not been made clear and no one asked
so (technically) no one has told a lie
but the truth of the matter is that something is missing
that was once here but no one got a good look at it
or heard it make a sound so it cannot be identified
though it can be missed (the whole world felt it
at least for an instant) so we bowed ourselves to it
subjecting entirely and then we denied it
swearing up-and-down it did not exist (and never did)
until finally we resigned ourselves to accepting
that things gone stay gone and we
will never know absolutely everything there is to know
or even a fraction of it (at least that is
what I would like to say but if you’ve ever spoken to
another person then you know we are still clawing
at our flesh and killing each other over
interpretations of something we’ve never known).



BIO

Allen Seward is a poet from the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. His work has appeared in Scapegoat Review, Bitter Melon Review, and Chewers, among others. He currently resides in WV with his partner and five cats.

@AllenSeward1 on Twitter, @allenseward0 on Instagram 







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.







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.







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.







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







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







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/







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.







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.












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 6th 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.







            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.”











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.







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.







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







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  


1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.







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











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