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Donald Patten “Mask Gleaners” (charcoal on canvas)
The Poetry
Kelli Allen
ROBBING THE TABLE WHERE NOTHING EXISTS
Both our jackets escaped the fall, but the radio stayed
a static river anyway, no matter how quick you reached,
then retracted long fingers, second-guessed. This brass
corned table, belly-up, is the last weight
marking our division. The potency of your salesmanship
is a mirror for your capacity to carry my promiscuity
to a studied tomb. You were ever conceding
to some gods of good. Your internal consistency,
my external proverb, worn as a medallion—sameness
bottled as weak midwestern hailstones in April.
Your back in its fullness presses into my spine.
We shuffle, a ghost crab pale apricot, only yellow inside
arterial walls, lining I Love You’s esophagus smooth,
and force all eight limbs toward a doorway no longer
ours. I stop to say us, the city outside answers nothing.
Mona Anderson
FOR ALL THE BOYS I KISSED
after George Bilgere
For J. who, when the bottle pointed to him,
raced across the circle to smother my closed
lips with his sloppy, wet mouth, nothing
like my pillow’s soft embrace. How I wondered
if this kissing stuff was for me. For B, stingy
with his kisses as though he’d run out. Is this
why my hungry eyes searched for his at every party?
When in truth his kisses were dry and empty
like the bottom dust in a Cheerios box.
For the boys who parked in the back row
of the drive-in movie theater and obliged
my drunken requests, as I stumbled from car
to car, with mostly chaste pecks so I woke
in the morning only somewhat mortified.
How I sat on C.’s lap in the crammed back seat
of the Horsemobile, so named for its driver’s
rather large nose. We necked — a strange name,
I thought, for something so exquisite — while friends
around us drank beer and sang Born to Be Wild.
For T., in another back seat in some guy’s Pontiac
left to be fixed in the bowels of the SuperAmerica
gas station where he worked, we worked on kisses
with lips sometimes soft and searching or hard
and gasping, my pillow practice a distant memory.
How I wish I’d have kissed more boys back then.
When I didn’t know others were sometimes forced
further around second or third base. That behind
neighbors’ doors, lips could sneer or bruise.
When it was only about the kiss and nothing more.
Jeff Bagato
SINGING THROUGH THE FLATS
Billie caught the melody
on the refrain;
her voice didn’t quite hit
that high note
so she let
the song continue
without her
“Play it again, I’m gonna
hit it this time.”
Easy enough
to back up a CD
The guitar lead rings
out, the rhythm churning tight
into the groove;
Billie comes in on cue,
holding her notes
steady through the first
high on the chorus,
but misses on the repeat,
and there are lots
of repeats
I come in singing the rest
with her, raggedy and raw;
we sound like shit,
but it’s the feeling
we wanted
Billie laughs when the song
fades out: “It sounds better
that way;
we gotta do it
like that every
time”
Robert Beveridge
ORISON
to Constance Plumley
Our bodies cleaved
to one another,
entangled as best we can
short of our molecules
intermingling. Your lips
on my shoulder, my fingers
at rest against the base
of your spine. We take up
too much space on the mattress
as we beseech any errant
higher powers to meld us,
make us taste not just with tongues
but with our whole skin,
make us sing each other’s euphoria
not just with lips
but with every atom
in the room.
Rose Mary Boehm
LETTER TO MY YOUNG AND VERY
HANDSOME ENGLISH TEACHER
Those foreigners are so perverse
as to attempt in English verse
amusing those whose life’s endeavor
is bringing language to whomever
is keen to have it brung to them.
Here goes – right in the lion’s den:
Dear friend, this thing, I fear,
is bigger than it did appear
at first. On second glance
a shift is taking place – by chance,
not by design – I’m sure.
But lust does have its own allure.
Object-specific in my case
I cannot see it as malaise,
just as a self-perpetuating
joy and excitement. And berating
the writer for neglect and hence
of self-inflicted abstinence.
Affection-based, good lust endures.
Thus, I remain, most truly,
Yours . . .
ODE TO MY BRA
Twin cradle of my flesh, once coveted
for the status it bestowed on girls
whose little bumps still hurt and barely showed,
now a sad necessity in my fight against gravity.
You weight bearer, enhancer, changing
shape with fashion dictated by men:
we once had sharply pointed breasts
under tight sweaters—
do you remember ‘Lost in Space’?
Then we neglected you, the seventies
freed our young breasts
from your perceived constraints
while you moped in dark drawers.
That didn’t last long. You soon reestablished
your dominance and convinced us
of our need for you.
You had your moments:
many an evening (and not always evenings)
it came off with a twang
removed by impatient hands
or just falling after a fumble in the dark.
I am grateful, dear brassiere,
life without you wasn’t as comfortable
as we imagined and only half the fun.
Ace Boggess
NEEDING FIRE
I must rush to buy a new lighter
before the last of my flame won’t reignite.
My cigarette stands naked in the cold.
Flick & flick, a spark, a lie
like one of those contraband prison Bics
exhausted down to flint & fumes.
I’ve cooked my tips with oven burners,
also using batteries & wire.
I’m not that wild man anymore.
I need an easy touch
to curl my extra finger.
Days of playfulness in desperation
are too far in the past
to jumpstart using what I have on hand.
Isabelle Bohl
HANDS ON THE WALL
I don’t mean those on penitentiary
cinder blocks
smeared with inmates’ blood,
stomped after the click of cuffs—
not these stains on our story, scrubbed out
to wash sin and evidence away.
I mean the stenciled hands waving
from the bosom of a Patagonian cave—
Neolithic ochre testaments—
I wish could reach through time
and hold
those of prisoners
and their captors in brotherhood.
We are those human hands.
Morgan Boyer
THANKSGIVING 2024
Seats unfilled as a muted
football game plays, its silence
echoing the mouths unopened
at the Thanksgiving table.
You wish you could go back.
Vote differently. Vote so your daughter
Would look you in the eye again.
Vote to rescue the bonds that you broke.
You didn’t know ties could
be severed by a red hat,
that the orange bull could pull
shared strands of DNA apart
that a single vote could undo 18 years
of Disney-themed birthday parties,
Wednesday movie nights, prom pictures,
and graduation dinners at the Cheesecake Factory
with the swipe of a finger on a dusty screen.
The air is as hollow as this joke of a Thanksgiving;
you try to rationalize your decision but come up short,
your defense undoing itself as the green beans
and mashed potatoes hold court. You won but also lost.
Brian Builta
SOMETHING LIKE SYMPATHY
Look, sweet life, I didn’t sign up
to be on some spectrum, or for
your well-intentioned examination
of my jellyfish collection,
the way a walk chaffs the crotch,
this bright hostile environment.
Reaching for the pickles, I sideswipe
the marmalade and presto: obscene grammar.
Look, crude promise, I don’t like you
and you don’t like me, but we
both have to deal with these
fucking cottonwood seed pods, so let’s
pretend this poem is a third grader
as you explain the procedure
you are about to perform.
Look, a foolproof rice technique
will only get you so far,
unclogging the toilet is on regular rotation,
dead roadside cats somehow disappear.
Look, I put so much faith
in that dashboard Jesus and fell
from a height anyway.
Next time we visit Kukulcan,
bring your own damn virgins.
Sarah Carleton
FILLING IN THE GAPS
When you’ve sunk miles into Route 15,
your skirt smushed frumpy in the seat of the car,
one breast rubbed raw by the shoulder belt,
you think of road trips launched at midnight
thirty years ago with 100,000 times more energy—
dark highway rolling, coolers and instrument
cases blocking the rear view, spaces wedged with
coffee cups and pretzels,
tapes spinning, jokes erupting, and you zingy,
ready to drive all night and arrive at dawn greeted
by one last straggling session among the dew-sweating tents.
But wait. This is spotty recall playing the song
wrong, skipping how you pined for sleep and drove dazed
for twelve hours after a cyclone style of packing
that once seemed etched into your DNA and is, in your 60s,
rare and how, once chairs were unfolded
and coffee brewed, you’d zombie through the day,
hedging melodies and riding chords.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
LAST SNOW
The sun yellows over the ridge, a ripe pear
in white sky above woods. Suddenly, March has
swallowed warmth and plays the porch railings
like a xylophone. Again, we become tenants of icy light,
of glassy stairs and glossed ramps, of Windex frozen
in the car seat. After winter’s wary locking in,
we are used to stillness, used to waiting, used to
watching countless TV procedurals.
Under their influence, this late freeze
the gleaming stoop, the slip-and-fall driveway,
the shadows taking shape in the side yard,
seem ordinary, until I catch a blessing of feathers
in the trees and feel incipient spring, although
I know only vultures fly in this weather.
TAKING TEA
What happened is at the bottom of my every day,
the residue in the teapot, the cobweb
I don’t see when I am up on the ladder dusting,
armadillo in the garden scything away at the pepper plants.
It’s not as if I don’t remember my sons’ formula breath
or holding my grandsons hostage on my lap,
but I’m wary of child-gossip and nursery-confession.
Instead, I think more about civics and loss,
the one misunderstood, the other hissing away slowly,
like a gas leak. Don’t mistake me— also love songs
and the damned moon, and if not devotion, then
hard breath and sweat, and mean shirts, oh, and drinking,
shutting the bar down, Still, there is curiosity, flirtation
and the incessant donkey work of lyric, all the while
swiping spiders, swallowing my tea, reading
the leaves stuck at the bottom of the cup.
Craig Cotter
THE LAST TIME
I saw the primary color
toy planes
I want to land on Carrie’s landing-strip
1969 at a corner store
on Watkins Lake Road in Drayton Plains, Michigan
I asked my mother about it last month
she said you could get tomato sausage there
they were behind glass
I had no money
and a strange man bought me one.
In Chinatown today
I visited 3 stores looking for small plastic planes
to send you one with the poem I wrote at lunch
(not at an Olivetti typewriter store).
Fuselage nose to tail 2 inches
wing span 2 inches—
I think the first one that should land on you
should be the green.
I never had a favorite color
but used to answer that when dumb-ass adults
(mostly teachers)
would ask.
I think of you crying naked in your bed
in Oceanside
my hand flying the plane over your territory.
Joe Cottonwood
TRANSPLANT
I never liked Phillip.
He was unkind to his mother.
Phillip died of a stroke.
(That is, post-stroke, comatose,
in tears his mom pulled the plug.)
Age 42. Smoker.
Blackened lungs. Other body parts—
clear corneas, pink kidneys, pancreas, liver,
plus a heart of questionable karma—
now travel in new bodies.
Those corneas—what wonders
shall they behold? Oh people!
Bear these gifts with grace.
And be kind to your mothers.
SHE RUNS THROUGH ROADWORK
Fists on hips
as if pushing pelvis
from mind
Head high, alone in earbuds
ponytail flaps
red flag
Bottom bounces
this side, that
Sweating workmen
pause to watch
Gloves
grip shovels
Silent, then
resume digging
So much of life
unspoken
Liz Craig
IN LOVE
Your watched hand rests on my thigh,
fingers dip.
Contend with hard edges –
reach around for seatbelt steadiness.
Discover new compartments
when prone and sliding open.
After I’m with you,
I have to readjust all my mirrors.
I’m a dripping doorway,
puddling on the floor.
Sensing residual friction heat,
you skillfully stroke my ego while
taking pictures of ceilings;
the decorated limits
play at your periphery.
Map memories,
a timeline view of emotion
colours locations past,
neatly frames each of our twenty-four hours.
While googling substitutions,
I slip in lust,
and land in Love.
THIS HAS PROMISE
My calendar is full of hearts.
I track how drippy I was last night.
My foot! You licked my wetness all the way up my leg.
All my clothes are inside out in each other,
past layers unwrapped.
Biscuits! have an exclamation and a capital in this new life.
Placing yesterday’s worries in the bin
I stick my nose in your beard,
edged with flowers.
Streetlight cum stains,
pools on my cheeks.
I’m red scented – you are wonder.
Counting as I cut the tops of strawberries,
I reach seven or eight million gods and think
This has promise.
THE WATCH
Happy good still night
plays like morning, but not quite.
In between first and second sleep
when we touch in the watch.
Tea cold, snow quiet –
waking up as half of a leg sandwich
with furry cat topping.
Happy good morning still, again.
Joe Crocker
STICK AND TWIST
The more that you dislike the way I am,
the less I worry what it is you like.
I let go the way that you don’t like
the rattled heart of me, the way I am.
Perhaps we’re going through a sticky patch.
The patch that stuck us down long years ago
is not as sticky now. But even so,
its tar has held us close enough to catch.
It covers up the cracks and hides the shabby
seams we couldn’t mend. We still pretend
to rub along regardless. In the end,
perhaps we are just averagely unhappy.
The way we blister love and twist its scar.
We sort of stick it out. And peel apart.
CS Crowe
THE FIG TREE
We knew where all the fruit trees lived.
Mulberries along the red dirt road,
Sweet lemons behind the barbershop,
Pomelos in Mr. Gene’s yard.
Figs in the corner of the abandoned lot.
How many times did we get stung by wasps
Trying to cross a meadow of wildflowers?
The whole world is the Garden of Eden
To children who do not yet understand borders.
Where the bumblebees flew, we wandered,
Where the carpenter bees buzzed, we sat.
Wherever we went, something bit or stung us,
But who cared? We collected used cigarettes.
Spread the ashes on the welts. Plucked fruit.
We didn’t think about pollination until it shared
A sentence with extinction and endangerment.
Together, we ate of this tree, juices dripping
Down our chins—never thinking of the wasps.
We raced each other and the birds, first
To eat the freshest fruit on the furthest limbs.
Not knowing what we left to rot, the trees
Waiting to grow from the drunkenness
Of their ancestors’ shade. Just like us.
John Davis
IN A POPLAR TREE
An engine or a saw what the what?
Two eagles flap black wings
in a heron nest, ravage fledglings,
claw, peck, scavenge baby flesh.
The mother, helpless, squawks, screeches.
How savage our national bird. Hear
the crunch-crackle of bones, the whoosh-whap
of wings. Same bird on a dollar bill
and national seal. Feel the frantic
struggle of the child clutched in claws,
the gnaw, the fly away before it’s swallowed.
Feel it, fledglings, the scrape, the gush
of blood what this man has done.
John Delaney
THE GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTRESS
The huntress stole the eaglet from its nest
and raised it like a family pet,
with proper feedings and companionship,
until a bond was formed between the pair.
The goal was winter hunting of red foxes.
Here, the girl demonstrates her control
of the eagle’s skill. It sits on her gloved arm,
wearing a little green hood over its eyes
to keep it calm as the girl talks and gestures.
Once it’s removed, the bird stands up, alert.
The pair, with an assistant, go uphill
to a rock outcrop, where the assistant
takes the bird and, on a given signal,
releases it while the girl runs back down,
dragging a fox skin behind. The eagle,
seeing the motion, swoops down to catch it,
receiving a meat snack reward. Then up
they go again. This time, when she runs down
she calls to it, and the bird wastes no time
rushing to her outstretched arm with its meat.
The two have become a devoted pair.
There’s something moving in their partnership.
For seven years, in hunting treks, contests,
and exhibitions, they’ll work together.
Then she’ll release the eagle to the wanton wild
like a vigilant parent with her grown-up child.
Ellen Estilai
OCTOBER 2024: STATER BROS. PARKING LOT, HOT SUNDAY BEFORE THE ELECTION
She came at me slant, pushing her cart across my path so I had to acknowledge her. Spring-coiled, she was itching for a conversation. I could have been anyone. I nodded to her and grabbed a cart, one that would roll straight. Seeing an opening, she began in mid-rant, offended by the grocery store’s prices, underwhelmed by the remodeling, cheated, fed up. She assumed I sympathized. Iranians would say, del e por khooni dasht, she had a heart full of blood, a lot to get off her chest. I’d been told we should listen, that we hadn’t listened enough, so I gripped my cart and waited. “Country’s a mess. Farmers in California have seeds in the ground, and the government’s taking our water, giving it to miners in Idaho.”
“Oh, are you a farmer?” I asked.
“No, I’m a victim.”
I angled my cart toward the store and its cool interior, preparing a non-committal farewell. Then her wheels came off. “It’s all gonna change when he’s elected, you know. The first three months will be really hard, but then,” her voice rising, “we’re gonna be rich and we’re gonna be free!”
“Gotta go,” I said. “Forgot my sunscreen.”
Hearts are full of blood.
Shopping carts in autumn’s heat
roll past each other.
Arvilla Fee
MY GRANDMA KNEW
Jesus
how to can tomatoes,
how to catch more flies with honey,
how to use the sun ball as a clock
she knew camp fires,
tin cans cut open with knives,
that moss mostly grew
on the north side of trees
she knew how to sing
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
and how to play the fiddle
that’d put Johnny boy to shame
She knew red morning skies
meant rain was coming,
she knew shelling peas
and thumping melons,
ghost stories in the night,
half-truths and outright lies,
she knew how to hold a girl-sized hand
when life went a little sideways.
Vern Fein
GUMSHOE LIT
A view of Micky Spillane and my Dad
My Dad quit high school as a sophomore.
The Depression impoverished his family.
He was an A student, told a story
about how he found a wallet with $5 in it.
Despite what a boon it was,
returned it and got praise for reward.
Despite his incomplete education,
Dad devoured books and loved them.
When I was a teen, he insisted
I read Hugo’s Les Miserables
over my angst and protest.
I became a literature professor.
But among the book stacks
beside his bed, crouched Spillane.
After my dad died, I picked up
I, the Jury, one of a flurry of novels
this tough-as-nails author’s
detective creation, the executing dick
Mike Hammer, reveled in. A perfect name
for the way that gumshoe and my Dad
approached their hard-boiled lives.
Sadly, later, when I found about my Dad’s
adultery and business chicanery,
I wondered if the pull of Spillane
had turned that wallet-returning,
noble young man into a scalawag.
When Mickey said he didn’t
give a damn about critics’ opinions
because more people ate
salted peanuts than caviar
and that none of his characters
drank cognac or sported mustaches
because he couldn’t spell the words,
or that he didn’t have fans but
a lot of customers because
that should be the goal of writers,
I understood my father better and wept.
Alessandra Foster
THE MINIMALIST
for Patricia
Inside the glossy greeting card
my best friend for sixty years
wrote “Happy Birthday –
From the minimalist to the enthusiast.”
The card’s cover shows a cat
flamboyantly arrayed
in gorgeous excess.
Draped in multiple feather boas
scarlet, emerald,
turquoise, electric blue,
the cat stands party-ready
to be admired and adored.
I loved the card, enjoyed its humor:
My friend got it right about us,
she reserved and I effusive.
But unlike her over-the-top cat,
my preferred array is unadorned gray
and I hate parties.
An enthusiast? Yes.
But also a pessimist
who usually sees the glass
empty and broken.
Which it is
since my friend died.
So at least in this poem
no hyperbole
no embellishment
no excessive admiration.
It’s the least I can do.
UNSAFE HARBOR
His grand piano stands grandly
in front of luxurious wine velvet drapes
drawn against the pale light
of a waning winter afternoon.
Manhattan traffic muted almost to silence,
they sit opposite each other on two large sofas,
a gently erotic pull between them
as they sip scotch from pewter goblets.
A cocooned ephemeral world
of music, beauty, comfort,
warmth inside and outside the body;
a leisurely evening of pleasure
lies ahead as she denies
his active alcoholism,
his suicide attempts,
his twenty-plus years of life before her birth,
his long-time love for the man he lives with
who is out for the evening.
Mae Fraser
DISSECTION OF THE MIDDLE CHILD
after “The Women in My Family are Bitches”
by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
middle child, rebel child
a pleasure to have in class child
queer child, lover child
cries at any instance child
invisible child, abused child
didn’t realize they were even abused child
life insurance child, award winning child
the only one keeping everything together child
no contact child, okay maybe sometimes child
doesn’t know how boundaries are supposed to be made child
scared child, conflictless child
terrified of standing up for themself child
friendly child, people pleaser child
so well behaved, should never be an earthquake child
hurricane child, olive branch child
afraid of repercussions child
healing child, therapist child
they do not know how to be anything but a pawn child
does anyone really know them at all, child?
Wendy Freborg
A SPIDER’S WEB
Leaving the patio that day,
our group came to a sudden halt —
between the bushes that marked our path
a spider had spun a work of art.
This fragile gossamer bridge,
a silken trap for the unwary,
sparkled in the sunshine. Athena herself
might not have met the challenge of this Arachne.
We were not the prey intended
but, humanlike, we could not let it be.
One threw a random flower,
watched it lodge in the sticky strands.
A museum curator might have declared,
“An innovative composition,”
but the spider was offended.
She claimed control of her own web.
Slowly, delicately, she rewove the corner of her web,
stubbornly excising the intrusive flower.
She worked diligently, weaving and cutting,
until the flower hung by a single strand.
Six of us watched for the final moment:
transfixed, we waited until the flower fell,
then we went our way, a different way —
respecting that spider and her web.
Marissa Glover
THE ETYMOLOGY OF REDUNDANCY
Words have power to shape
the world. Just ask Adam
or the Associated Press.
Language is living,
will outlive us, will
tell our lineage
about us the way
history books tell kids
about King George III.
Words, like people,
cannot be trusted.
What is it about human nature
that compels us to indulge,
to be extra, to resent basic,
to talk about literally dying
while we’re literally not?
“He drank copious amounts
of whiskey.” Did he?
Drink large amounts
amounts of whiskey?
In an unhinged world,
where warriors watch
our every word, policing
poets and protestors,
who greenlights nonsensical
nomenclature?
Is there such a thing
as an inactive shooter?
John Grey
AS SEEN IN DAYLIGHT
It may seem like a disguise
but this is me. I peeled off
the suave mask. And the false
piercing eyes. And the fake ears
that listened to your every word.
And the trick mouth that spoke
its lines so sweetly. This is what
I’m like when I’m ordinary.
Love this and you get this.
Love this and I’ll throw in
the masquerade.
Max Gutmann
TERRY, FLYING IN FROM CHICAGO
Terry, flying in from Chicago,
fingers the fashion magazine she bought
to kill time back at O’Hare, contemplates
a fraying seam in her seat, wordlessly
declines the tray the stewardess offers.
The elderly man in the next seat snores,
a shirt tail hanging over his seat belt.
Clouds wrinkle the sky. Her eyes won’t stay shut.
The engine’s wide white noise filling her ears,
she fights the impulse to tuck his shirt in,
and, clenching, shoves all her worn strength into
the hope he’ll stay asleep until they land.
Erin Hay
BAG OF HANDS
Left in a mess of empty drinks,
tossed aside on a tropical beach
elegant skeleton, papered, as if in silk,
consider the cocktail umbrella
a bright bourgeois surprise
piña colada’s class, trash in disguise
half-buried there in Huatulco’s sand
until the beach seller’s bored teen,
nervous, and starry-eyed, grabbed it.
just as we all locked eyes;
the alibrije vending Mamà,
the petty umbrella snatcher
and previously, anonymous, me.
She knew, we knew she was sneaking.
“los manos? no necesitas tus manos, mija?”
the mom asked, hissing ironic, fury
the kid dropped it, hot, like a dead bird
its blue eggshell wing augured in
dropped it, like it was never hers
dropped it like that bag of eight hands
discovered first by flies, then by federales
petty thieves. chopped like chicken.
hands first off. bagged for effect. four sets.
the narcos barely covered the rest
up along that quiet highway,
near the Oaxaca-Puebla state line,
half-buried in sand.
Robin Helweg-Larsen
WINE CELLAR
Down in the cobwebbed cellars of the mind
fabulous wines you don’t dare drink are stored,
each carrying a price you can’t afford;
so you pass by, deliberately blind.
Upstairs a loved one, dreamier than a vision,
displays each quality your soul desires –
or is a mere projection from the fires
the building’s furnace stokes with soft derision.
Your passions aren’t alive, alight, upstairs:
your love a mere projection of the schemes
the animated house evolves. Your dreams
live in your basement, though you’re unawares.
Though Bacchus urge you to uncork that wine,
the world would find it filthy, not divine.
D. A. Hosek
CHICAGO SONNET 26
Ain’t no one gon’ choose to live in no tent
Inna park with the trash and the dirt and the cold,
But you fresh outta jail ain’t got one damn cent
And every single place you go you told,
“This ain’t no place for you we got children here,
Folks with jobs, responsibility and you—and you—
Some broke, broke-down ex-con. You wanna be near
These straight folk with your criminal life? Who
Would ever stand for such a thing?” So I got
Myself a tent, don’t ask how or where,
Claimed me a patch of grass with this whole lot.
Now I gotta leave cause the straight folk get scared.
Spent all day looking for a place, started at dawn,
The city came by and took my shit while I was gone.
Ann Howells
IN MY DNA
I respond to taut tendons
beneath tanned forearms,
deep chuckles of surprise.
Deep in tangled ganglia
I am certain . . .
were I blue-nose baboon
within your pheromone waft,
the call would be the same.
Seed within you sing to me
like a rain stick.
Deep in tangled ganglia
I am certain . . .
were I warthog, sea slug, lupine,
I would feel the brush
of springtime’s round belly,
produce a perfect spherical ovum.
Linda Laderman
I CANNOT ESCAPE
my body—a covered by the dark body, an unrepresented body, a succumbed to plastic surgery body, an unruly body, this body belongs to me, my wholly unrepentant body, a hide your saggy arms body, living in a boney body, a body left for a forbidden body, a dress your age body, a mirrored body, a legislated body, at night I pray my baby is not a girl body, my pregnancy is not an exhibit, let me touch your baby belly body, a you look too thin body, a where do I put my hunger body, a how much did you lose body, a hey look at the fat girl body, a heckled by construction workers body, why are people staring, a what did you do to incite him body, a stranger moving a hand up my leg body, why blame me, a breasts developed too young body. My body is a lover I cannot leave.
Karen Laugel
ANYWAY
Nicole Brown Simpson was found
nearly decapitated on June 12, 1994,
after documenting 62 instances of domestic abuse
during her marriage to OJ Simpson, and Afghani Malala Yousaf
was shot in the head for advocating for girls’ education,
while Atsede Niguse, seeking a divorce, was blinded
and disfigured by her Ethiopian husband who
flung battery acid in her face. He has yet to be charged.
Look up when you walk along the garden path and live
in the space where the birds sing. Journalist E. Jean Carroll
sued a now-sitting President
for sexual assault and won. Nothing.
Attorney Anita Hill and Professor Christine Blasey Ford
reported being sexually assaulted by
two different candidates for Supreme Court Justice,
both of whom were appointed anyway. I sometimes
wonder about the unique vertebrae in the heron’s neck,
crucial for executing lightning-fast strikes. Over 80 women,
led by Italian actress Asia Argento, reported incidents
of sexual assault and rape committed by
producer Harvey Weinstein, whose conviction was overturned
in appeal. My husband grabbed my breast in public
and would not apologize. You’re making too much of it he said.
I like the cacophony of songbirds at dawn. I like
my oldest pair of slippers because they’ve molded to my feet.
Rania al-Baz, a Saudi Arabian television broadcaster published
photographs of herself after being beaten by her husband
for answering the phone without his permission. She left
for France, apparently never to return. Don’t go
more than three days without listening to music and learn
to play an instrument if you can. Janay Palmer was struck
unconscious in a hotel elevator by her fiancé, Ravens running
back, Ray Rice. They married the day after the assault.
The Legend, Tina Turner, repeatedly suffered a broken nose
and third degree burns at the hands of her controlling husband,
Ike. Why didn’t you just lock the bathroom door,
queried my husband’s lawyer during our divorce trial.
I did, I said.
I kayak alongside riverbanks of ribbed mussels and fiddler crabs
and paint them with watercolors in my book of wonders. I share
my writing with bad-tempered poets. I ride my bicycle
over the dunes and celebrate the wind on my face.
Richard LeDue
DAY 4 OF A 6 DAY TRIP
Roadkill isn’t very poetic,
nor is passing on a double line,
but an open car window
on a hot day
feels more like freedom
than the most feathered metaphor,
and our empty soda cans are full
of minutes and miles.
Nancy Smiler Levinson
MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME
My true love gave to me
a Zenith radio during our courtship
after my NY apartment was burglarized
My true love gave to me
a sterling silver Georg Jensen pin
on my birthday in our first year of marriage
My true love gave to me
a bronze leather handbag for the new pantsuit craze
suggested by a saleswoman in Los Angeles
My true love gave to me
A Valentine gift of black lacy under panties
from famed Fredericks of Hollywood
My true love gave to me
a drop moonstone necklace on our 30th anniversary
while celebrating the weekend in San Francisco
My true love gave to me
an Italian watch parties flower bouquets on special
occasions throughout the following sixteen years
My true love gave to me
a small white rose for Mother’s Day
together we put it in a glass of water
a paper flower he had made in Day Care
Jeremy Mauser
AUBADE IN A WINDOWLESS ROOM
I don’t remember dozing off, and neither
will you; I have no idea whether it’s dawn,
whether the sun batters every room but ours.
Part of me hopes that our corner of the city
is still coated in moonglow, that our friend S.
will continue to sleep in his bedroom, because
what a joy it is to finally capture this intimacy
with you, what ecstasy to confirm the depths
of our friendship. In a couple hours I will tell
E. we slept together, and she’ll chuckle, then
say we’re cute (even though you and I are
queer, even though she has asked more than
once whether I’ll be okay if I’m never with
another man in that way again). E. will ask
if I can say you and I shared the futon, rather
than saying we slept together, and I’ll oblige.
When S. emerges from his room, I’ll feign
sleep, and he’ll let out an exasperated groan;
because to share a bed with someone means
to claim a sort of ownership. Because you
and me sleeping together, this is a skit,
an act we will never repeat. A reminder
that we are what we are, and we inherit
the confines of our conduct from our
straight friends. Tonight you’ll sleep
in S.’s bed, and I’ll stare at the ceiling,
the warmth of your breath echoing
on my neck. But isn’t it special—no,
really, it is—isn’t it special how we
woke up without a dawn.
MR. THESEUS HEAD
If we were Mr. Potato Heads, if our
limbs were detachable, would you
want to swap arms with me, maybe
just for the day? I’d love to rip out
your blue eyes and hand you mine—
like I said, just for the day—so we
can learn how differently we taste
the same colors. Tell you what,
after that I’ll swap our legs because
I want to understand how it feels
to be short like you—no offense—
and to look up at everyone every
day. No offense. From there, if you’re
still onboard, my fellow Mr. Potato
Head, I’ll grab your dick, and hand
you mine, and when I touch myself,
I’ll really be touching you, which
is kinda sweet, man, don’t you agree?
Would it be considered masturbation
if I reached between your thighs
and stroked the artist formerly known
as my penis? At what point am I
no longer myself, are you more me
than I am me? If I ran away after
swapping all our limbs, would
you chase me? Or would we
accept our new bodies, remain
friends, and stare into our old eyes
with a masculine affection we
never could find in the mirror?
Tim Mayo
AT THE CHEMO CLINIC
It’s been several years since I went, and I went only once
to accompany my daughter. So, now, as I try to dredge up
the details to tell you or to tell anyone who, unafflicted,
does not suffer, though we all do in our different ways,
my memory melds the moment with my imagination,
makes of it something other than it is or was.
Picture yourself out for your ritual Sunday drive,
and you need gas, so, you pull in to your local Exxon
to fill up your body for a trip to an aimless place,
circling around the lake of regret, asking yourself
why you didn’t do this before, cruising on through
the neighborhood of wistfulness. What can I say?
I remember the twitter of small talk in the treatment room.
How it echoed like spring, surprising me with its sound,
as, armed with her pillow, book, and cellphone, my daughter
picked a private spot to wait for the attendant nurse to come,
attach the clear plastic hose to her chest and start the pump,
so I could see how prayer poured into the hourglass of her heart.
Jason Melvin
USED BOOKS II
Cathy had a colonoscopy scheduled
I know this from the letter
stuffed in the first few pages
of a Stephen King novel
pulled off the shelf at the used bookstore
her home address phone number
and gastrologist in bold black ink
I can’t help but ponder
the state of Cathy’s butthole
and if polyps were present
I hope they weren’t cancerous
her appointment was three years ago
any bad news would have been dealt with
I hope she’s doing well
and has picked up the latest King novel
it was a banger
Corey Mesler
KATHY DAWSON
I took Kathy Dawson’s hand.
I wanted to kiss
her but she was a neighbor
and, if it failed,
it would have failed too
close to home.
I wanted to kiss Kathy Dawson
and unfold her the
way a flower opens in the
dawn. I can see now
how white her body would have
been, how it would have
felt when I entered her like a sin.
JK Miller
ICELANDISH
After parsing
the human genome
and passing out
Sniffin’ Sticks
a neurologist in Iceland
discovered a mutant gene
that makes some people
there
immune
to the reeking odious funk
of rotten or fermented fish.
These people
can’t recognize
the piscine perfume
caused by the chemical
trimethylamine (TMA)
even when it hits them
smack in the face.
Instead
they smell
caramel, potato,
ketchup
and roses.
Nor does
body odor
or urine
spoil them.
which explains
the Icelandic tradition
of fermenting shark
by pissing on it
and burying
it in the dirt.
or serving up
sour ram’s testicles,
cod tongues,
and fish bellies.
I wonder if
an olfactory mutation
can explain
our tolerance for
Donald Trump.
Icelanders,
you devils!
You enjoy
tickling
our noses,
don’t you?
Elisabeth Murawski
BEST
She laughed too loud
and didn’t like to read,
told too many lies.
No smiles in her eyes
for a fistful
of wilting dandelions
picked just for her.
I took it home,
the small wooden table
they found her
leaning against
in her last loneliness.
I keep it in the den,
stacked high with books.
Who am I to say
her best wasn’t good enough.
Nina Nazir
I MET CARLOS CASTANEDA IN A BAR
He was drunk when he came in
or on something, probably
those peyote buttons he tried one time.
He wanted to tell me stories
while I served him up a pale ale
and asked him what he was doing
around these here parts.
Looking for an ally, he said
or power, or both.
Sounds fascinating, I said
thinking I better not
serve him again after this one.
He lit up a joint and I told him
he couldn’t smoke in here
but he only blew me a smoke ring
and began telling me about the time
he wrestled a moth the size of a tree.
It’s the shaman’s sign, he said
if a moth flies into you, scattering
its gold dust upon your person.
Ah, I said, thinking, I hope dude’s not driving
but then he blew another smoke ring
and a smaller one through that
and they turned into demons
fighting in mid-air
and I grew kind of hypnotised.
I noticed too
how his jade-green eyes
turned purple then dark. Felt like
some kind of sorcery was going down.
What is this ally you’re looking for?
I asked, intrigued despite myself.
One that holds an answer to my riddle, he mused.
Problem is I don’t know what form it’ll take
or if I’m in the right place
but I followed the gold dust
and it led me to you.
I laughed, thinking
that was a line I hadn’t heard before
but he didn’t laugh with me
and asked instead When was the last time
you saw the moon make love to the sun?
When was the last time
you had a good night’s sleep, sir?
I didn’t want to play his game,
I had no time for riddles
and it was nearly the end of my shift.
Would you care for a midnight walk? he asked.
Hackles risen, I merely smiled
then turned away to serve someone else
but when I returned he’d disappeared
and a huge moth
the size of my hand
fluttered over my head
into the lamplight,
spraying gold dust as it went.
Tom Probasco
SIGN
I drive by a wooden sign,
attached to a tree
near some other trees,
that no longer says
what it said.
It says nothing, now,
or something I can’t see,
having lost its paint,
apparently.
A bare board,
yet the shape reveals
a manufacturing.
A bit hidden,
still it’s in a position
to speak.
Week after week
I pass it,
and I thought today,
it seems to be saying more and more
whatever the trees say.
David Ram
FORGIVE US, RACCOON
The first morning after the full Wolf Moon
you materialized, frozen solid
atop a shoreline alder in your worn
winter coat, eyes closed, domino mask lolled,
front paws slung across a branch and hind ones
dangling from your paunch. Young mothers assured
their small skaters that you would wake up soon.
An ice fisherman claimed he found you dead
inside a hollow bole, moved and arranged
you in that pose as a practical joke.
While gawkers snapped cell pictures and wondered
aloud, for three days you never awoke
but fell below in a slushy barrow,
your impromptu mausoleum of snow.
Amy Riddell
DRIVING YOUR ASHES BACK
FROM THE CREMATORIUM
I crashed
into the hard truth
of your no longer
being,
the impact
a measure
of denial,
the face of finality
blind-
folded
with the dishcloth
of daily care,
how you
inched away
so silently
I never saw
you slipping
into
the mouth
of the envelope
just handed
to me
across
a scarred
conference
table,
a signed
certificate,
your name
printed there
and everything
else I can’t say,
the car idling
at the stoplight,
your cardboard
box
buckled in.
DAUGHTER
Her arms open
she appears
beside me
heals
the gash
between what is
and what was
recovers
what fell down
the dry well
of me
a dusty ruin
grief’s tears
sacred
in the font
of her hands
that held mine
when
she took
her first steps
now repairing
what’s
broken
in my bones
so that I
can walk
my way back
to yes.
Michael Sandler
SHIVER ME TIMBERS
I try to calm him, but he tacks,
forays under the Jolly Roger,
salvos fired from the gunlocks
trying to blow out of the water
what’s gathering at the horizon,
a first day of kindergarten.
He dons an eye patch. Arrr!
he growls as if spitting a hardtack
of reading, writing, ‘rithmatic,
so I say It’s okay to feel scared.
But he jibes, flees, giving my flank
no quarter…
I’d walk the plank
for him, but can’t sail on his sloop
or fathom staying here, marooned.
Claire Scott
INSANITY
Most members of my family
suffer from minor illnesses
like spring allergies, light headaches
and insanity, particularly my grandfather
and my mother (isn’t it always the mother?)
but also my brother and of course me
who has spent thousands on therapists
who at first are interested, wondering
if sneezes, coughs and mild migraines
are psychosomatic, trying EMDR, CBT,
somatic work or having me sit in a chair
across from my cough and asking it what it wants
they rarely get to the problem of insanity
tackling the low hanging fruit first
paying no attention to the man under the couch
humming Old MacDonald
the arsenic in my cup of tea or the fact
that my landlady stabbed her husband
and stuffed him in the furnace which is why
my clothes smell of scorch
therapists eagerly take my checks
until they finally give up
saying it isn’t a good fit
as they spray eucalyptus air freshener
and sing EE I EE I O
Donald Sellitti
THE NUMBERS
His eyes had died before the rest
of him. Lifeless in their sockets,
though the numbers on the monitor
claimed that he still lived.
We took our places around the bed
and began the mourning weeks before
the beeping stopped and they called it death.
We spoke of him in past tense now.
I wrote. Mary cried. And Jimmy called
his bookie. Placed a bet on daddy’s heart
rate as the old man lay there brain dead,
empty-eyed, immobile.
The number just kept coming up
and coming up: one seven seven,
insistent as a baby bird.
Beeping, flashing, pulsing like
he’d hit the jackpot at the slots.
A message from a God
who’s always leaving signs for those
who play the numbers. Little clues
to keep them at the table, feeling lucky.
We all threw in except for dad;
a dollar or two at five hundred
to one. A long shot, just for fun.
Dad was told his odds were good,
so he bet it all. Unlike Dad, we won.
Next day, Jimmy threw a wad of
bills between dad’s legs and
divvied out the cash as if the
old man wasn’t even there.
We pocketed our winnings
as dad stared at the ceiling
with vacant eyes, waiting to pass
through the photo of a plane
I’d pasted there.
A Cessna 180, I think.
That was the number.
Yeah.
Anushka Sen
GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD
Another poisoned squirrel hits the street,
stopping short your jaunty midday tread.
The city lays its secrets at your feet.
It rots more still and slow than fallen leaves;
the resting pose as definite as lead.
Another poisoned squirrel hits the street.
Classic mixup: rat for squirrel, bait for feed.
POISON, posters scold, PROTECT YOUR PET.
The city lays its secrets at your feet.
Someone went too far, we all agreed,
and left the vermin running wild instead!
And yet, a poisoned squirrel hits the street,
so stiff, so angular, no longer sweet,
the stare indecent on the outsize head.
The city lays its secrets at your feet—
you learn how light your step is, how discreet,
how intricate the alleys of your dread.
Another poisoned squirrel hits the street.
The city lays its secrets at your feet.
Mary Sesso
DEATH IS AN OLD MAN’S SWEETHEART
Dad told me I needn’t have come,
said he wasn’t scared. He and death
had been friendly for years. Now
they were closer. Death covered him
with its jaundiced shadow—even
the part in Dad’s hair turned yellow.
It’s like they were lovers—
the two in such a tight embrace
Dad’s breath began to stumble.
The last night they lay down
together, it’s as if death
said I would never leave you,
so why hang on until tomorrow?
My flowers came to say goodbye.
Heidi Slettedahl
YOU VISIT OFTEN
The website told me this today.
You visit often.
The site that holds my father’s life.
His daily records.
What he eats.
How often they turn him in the night.
You visit often?
No, no, I don’t.
Not enough.
Nowhere near enough.
Paul Smith
BEEP BEEP
The rich of us have Sisyphus
the rest of us have Wile E Coyote
it is paranormal or something
to push a rock up a hill
but to chase something
uncatchable
now is normal
where we live there
are no hills
no boulders
there are dreams
there are buses
there are girls
they get away
I saw them
going to a party
in their Coupe de Ville
what were they doing here
in the flatirons?
In Nowheresville?
they probably were lost
I thought about chasing them
but the Roadrunner
caught my attention
and I chased him instead
that’s the thing
isn’t it
Sisyphus fails just one way
we fail
by running into a painted tunnel
disappearing into a dust cloud over a canyon
blowing up a mountain that falls on us
skiing off the side of a cliff
ACME TNT exploding in our face
we’ve learned to flop in countless ways
Heraclitus might call it progress
OUTCAST
A man should not see
a woman discarded by
the coterie she clings to
hanging by her coattails
and by shreds of talk
dismissed
as nonsense
gaze downcast
ignored
sad wave of the arm at half mast
then the silent walk away
from where there is laughter
and nowhere to go
eyes at the floor
full of what once was hope
look down a corridor
where there is a stairway
a stairway going down
to a street full of
sunlight
and noise from Marvin Gardens
loud as a steam engine
that welcomes
and comforts
and functions as a purge
a suppository
that supposes what was
was not
and that room upstairs
no longer exists
like the man
that never saw
Alec Solomita
OUT OF TOWNERS
“This grass ain’t blue,” she says, rolls the window down. “What’s all this bluegrass bullshit?”
“Well, it’s blue-ish. Enjoy it.”
“‘Blue-ish?’ You mean like you’re boorish?”
“Like you’re shrewish.”
“That’s not so nice.” She lifts her ankles around Rob’s neck sitting shotgun. “Anyway, what I am is bored-ish.”
“Don’t fight.” Rob turns on the radio, fiddles string out twanging.
“That’s bluegrass,” says Iris laughing, “and we ain’t fightin’, we be fussin’, right Jethro? That differn’t ta fightin’.” Then softening, “Wish we were back in Providence. What be the name o’ dat filly again? ‘Flake?’”
“‘Snake,’” I say “and when we get there, that sombitch gonna make us rich.”
“You’re the son of a bitch,” says Iris.
“Once more,” Rob intones, “unto the breach!”
“Nah,” I say, “We’re OK. ’Long as Snake sheds her skin and slides down that track bright scales flashing, everything’ll be jake.”
“Don’t make no never mind to me,” Iris sings, hillbilly travesty redux. “As long as ah gets me one of dem Peppermint Juleps.”
“Mint Juleps,” Rob corrects with a sigh, “not peppermint. Actually, at the Derby they use spearmint.”
“Well ah’ll be!” Her quick smile a flashbulb blinding.
Galen Steele
GOODNESS
Even patience has its limits
and yells at the kids sometimes.
I once saw peace give joy a bloody nose,
and after the second drink
even self control
will make out with faithfulness.
Recently kindness
spread gossip that made gentleness cry,
and just today love
took one glance at me
and said,
“Look,
I think we both
need some space.”
Dan Thompson
DAD
I see him leaned over the old radio,
trying to get Hank just a little bit clearer.
It’s 9:30
and the folks went to bed a long half-hour ago.
It’s the decade of the birth
of rock
and roll
but the lonely young man
from rural Vermont
has a stronger connection
with the blues-infused
country music of the American South.
He hums along with
“Wedding Bells,”
then sings the words when
“Your Cheatin’ Heart”
reaches out to him over the air …
a big smile on his face.
Susan Thornton
RESTLESS TRAVELER
Restless traveler when you see
a beggar sitting cross legged on
pavement before the post office
staring into a paper cup
when you venture into cobbled
neighborhoods and glimpse
a second story beauty lifting
vibrant silk shift over her dark head
revealing in window frame
petal breasts & slender hands
adorned with pointed shiny nails
you will know you have found a place
to both attract and repel you.
Rebecca Weigold
THE RAPTURE OF EVE
After Our Daily Bread (Le Pain Quotidien) by René Magritte (Belgium) 1942
You bit into a crimson cosmic crisp and your earthy eyes
widened, transformed into otherworldly blue. Glorious
golden dew dripped from your rebel-red lips to your chin,
the wetness new and surprising. A gown of light fell
from your body, puddled at your feet, burned off like fog.
For the first time, you noticed petal-pink nipples of
delicate breasts, shapely curves of belly and thighs. With
fruit in hand, you saw your skin blush with dayspring.
You were not made a creature of sacrifice, not even of
your own apple. So you plucked another and ran with it
through Eden, plunged breathless in a meadow of laughter,
ate the tart and gorgeous fruit, dropped flirtatious daisy
florets from your fingers: he loves me, he loves me not.
When you came upon Adam sleeping in the cleft of a rock,
you paused to ponder his naiveté, envy his intact cloak of
righteousness, lust for him. You woke him excitedly and
gave him his fruit. He ate, then saw you with fresh eyes.
Now you stood above him unveiled, pinkened and ripe,
on billowy fields of white devil’s trumpets, swollen
clouds of water hemlock and scarlet speckled lilies; you
stood, commanding heaven’s mysteries against a sun of
intellectual fire in a probing blue sky. Adam exclaimed,
“Meh asinu?!” and you cried. You cried at a glimpse
of your first bruise, the sting of your first scratch, the blood
when Adam entered you. You saw the first wake of vultures
gorge on a carcass and you were horrified. You thought of
what it meant for the rest of us. The endless graves that
would come. I wonder if you self-harmed, apologized to your
daughters. You are maligned because your paradise is now
our graveyard. But allow me to celebrate you with sparkling
Moët & Chandon, your heart’s desire of love poem
rhododendrons, a timeless black dress of effortless grace,
and my best Gala apple crisp.
I would have done the same.
Kit Willett
ANYTHING WITH A FLARED BASE
Wherever I find myself in the house,
there will always be close to hand
a small object with a big function.
a votive tealight stand, for holding prayers,
a resin vase, for showing dried wildflowers,
a bottle, to store the finest perfume,
a paperweight, glass, to keep things still,
a polished stone pestle, for the grinding,
slow and rough and deliberate,
the breaking open, the penetration
of warm and fragrant spice,
a ceramic incense burner, a reminder
of all the beauty of the world
as the smoke rises lazily to heaven.
Robin Wright
FUCK PARKINSON’S
In Memory of James
My brother-in-law, diagnosed
in his late forties, knew
he couldn’t win
the brutal aggression
but fought on his terms.
Karate classes to start the attack,
middle finger poised at the disease
that chose him. Four years later
a black belt to wear or slap
across the face of Parkinson’s.
He continued medieval reenactments,
excelled at and taught the art
of armored combat, fencing,
archery. Now, his body no longer
able to resist the disease,
he waits in an urn
to be buried next to his parents,
burned to ash
as black as his belt.
Artist’s Bios:
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. Allen’s latest book is Leaving the Skin on the Bear, C&R Press, 2022. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. kelli-allen.com
Mona Anderson, a retired clinical mental health counselor, has lived in the New Hampshire countryside for 46 years where she and her husband raised two sons and a multitude of cats. She is co-author of The Art of Building a House of Stone. Her work has appeared most recently in Touchstone, Smoky Quartz, Adanna Literary Journal, Northern New England Review, Earth’s Daughters, Voices Unbound (An Anthology of International Poetry), Portrait of New England and others.
Jeff Bagato produces poetry and prose as well as mail art, electronic music and glitch video. New books for 2022 document experimental text work from the past few years, including In the Engine Room with Bettie and Andrea Reading Pornography, Gonch Poems, Robot Speak, and Floral Float Flume: Flue Flit Flip. A blog about his writing and publishing efforts can be found at jeffbagato.wordpress.com.
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry on unceded Mingo land (Akron, OH). He published his first poem in a non-vanity/non-school publication in November 1988, and it’s been all downhill since. Recent/upcoming appearances in The Pierian, Utriculi, and Discretionary Love, among others.
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born UK national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her work has been published (and rejected) widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and in print). She was several times nominated for a ‘Pushcart’ and ‘Best of Net’. Her eighth book, LIFE STUFF, was published by Kelsay Books (November 2023). A new chapbook is about to be published. www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His forthcoming books include poetry collections, My Pandemic / Gratitude List from Mōtus Audāx Press and Tell Us How to Live from Fernwood Press, and his first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, from Running Wild Press.
Isabelle Bohl began writing poetry upon retiring from teaching. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have appeared in Quartet, The Rye Whiskey Review, Glassworks, and anthologies. Her collaboration poetry book Our Various Selves is coming soon from Cold River Press. She was born in France and recently moved from the Northern Adirondack Mountains to the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018), If I Wasn’t Sacred (Alien Buddha Press, 2025) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer resides in Pittsburgh, PA.
Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. His poetry has been published most recently in Freshwater Literary Journal, Meridian, and Red Ogre Review. In first grade he won a blue ribbon for the 35-yard dash and in second grade he was Most Outstanding Student for the month of October. He is the author of A Thursday in June and Everyday Oblivion and more of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com
Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, ONE ART, Valparaiso, SWWIM, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Poetry Award for The Mercy of Traffic. Her first book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, was reissued by Belle Point Press in 2022. Her second, Discount Fireworks, is online at Doubleback Books. Her most recent Anthology publication is in Attached to the World: a New Ecopoetry Anthology 2025. Find her at wendytaylorcarlisle.com
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in the U.S., France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, India and Ireland. Books include The Aroma of Toast, Chopstix Numbers, and After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. www.craigcotter.com
Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest books of poetry are Foggy Dog and Random Saints. He appreciates wagging tails and dog-eared pages. His website is joecottonwood.com.
Liz Craig is a professional pianist and music teacher in Toronto, ON, Canada. She’s been writing poetry since her teen years and finds that just the right combination of words can help her revisit a delicious memory. She has been published in the Manitoban and Young Ravens Literary Review.
Joe Crocker has a 25 yds breast-stroke certificate, several Scouting badges and “O” level Epistemology. He has won prizes – bubble bath mostly, a bottle of Baileys once. His poems squat in obscure corners of the internet. Googling him will tell you all about a deceased Sheffield-born rock singer. He gets by with little help from friends.
CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.
John Davis is the author of Gigs, Guard the Dead and The Reservist. His work has appeared in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in several bands.
John Delaney’s publications include Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of his son Andrew’s photographs and his poems, Nile (2024), poems and photographs about Egypt, and Filing Order: Sonnets (2025). He lives in Port Townsend, WA.
Ellen Estilai is a former university lecturer and arts administrator who has found a third career as a poet and essayist. In 2023, she published a memoir of Iran, Exit Prohibited (Inlandia Institute), and a hybrid chapbook, The Museum of Missing Things (Jamii Publishing). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Heron Tree, and New California Writing 2011.
Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio with her husband, three of her five children, and two dogs. She teaches for Clark State College, is the lead poetry editor for October Hill Magazine, and has been published in over 100 magazines. Her three poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: Never travel without snacks. Visit her website and her new magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/
Having published over 300 poems and short prose pieces on over 100 different sites, Vern Fein, a late starting poet, is delighted to be part of the poetry world in his retirement and able to read in public and spread the poetry word in his community as well as participate in the local and the Rat’s Ass on-line sessions. He has published two books so far and is aiming at another in 2026. A few of his publications are: Gyroscope Review, Young Raven’s Review, Bindweed, *82 Review, River & South, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Rat’s Ass Review.
Alessandra Foster, lifelong and long-lived reader and writer of poetry. Publications: Bramble, Literary Veganism, Moss Piglet, Verse-Virtual. Loves dogs. Enjoys TCM classics, including Noir Alley, and Hallmark romances. Vegan forty-three years.
Mae Fraser (they/she/he) is a hopeless romantic poet from the New Hampshire seacoast. Their work has been published in Sheepshead Review, Santa Fe Writer’s Project Journal, and Northern New England Review, among others. You can find them online @maeflowerreads or in a cafe or underneath their giant pile of unread books.
Wendy Freborg’s humor has appeared in Scalar Comet, American Bystander, Little Old Lady Comedy, and Defenestration. Her poetry (mostly less funny) has been published by Rat’s Ass Review, Right Hand Pointing, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and WestWard Quarterly. She is a retired social worker and editor.
Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s busy swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her poetry collections, Let Go of the Hands You Hold and Box Office Gospel, are published by Mercer University Press. (Go Bears!) Recent work is found in Whale Road Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Ink Sweat & Tears. Look for new work upcoming in Eunoia Review and Spare Parts. You can follow Marissa on social at _MarissaGlover_
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River&South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Cantos.
Max Gutmann has contributed to New Statesman, The Spectator, Able Muse and dozens of other publications. His plays have appeared throughout the U.S. and have been well-reviewed (see maxgutmann.com). His book There Was a Young Girl from Verona sold several copies.
Erin Hay is a California poet, with several poems previously published in the Rats Ass Review. She lives with her beloved, a ceramic artist, and an inspiring menagerie of pets and plants.
Anglo-Danish by birth but Bahamian by upbringing, Robin Helweg-Larsen has lived and worked in the Bahamas (bank clerk), Denmark (factories and janitorial), Canada (prison guard, bookstore owner), Australia (restaurant work), USA (25 years of developing and teaching business simulations around the world). Now working on his poetry at formalverse.com
D. A. Hosek’s poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose, Meniscus, Great Lakes Review, Bronze Bird Review, Belt Magazine and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from the University of Tampa. He lives and writes in Oak Park, IL and spends his days as an insignificant cog in the machinery of corporate America. dahosek.com @dahosek.bsky.social
Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. Recent books include: So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press, 2020). Chapbooks include: Black Crow in Flight, Editor’s Choice –Main Street Rag, 2007 and Softly Beating Wings, 2017 William D. Barney winner (Blackbead Books). Ann’s work appears in many small press and university journals here and abroad. She is a multiple Pushcart nominee.
Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Westchester Review, Eclectica, The MacGuffin, Rats Ass Review, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit. More work and information at lindaladerman.com.
Karen Laugel is a physician and emerging writer who lives on the Delaware coast with her kayaks. Her poems have appeared in Pen in Hand, the Tipton Poetry Journal, and the Quartet Journal. Additional works will soon be featured in the Bay to Ocean Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, and the Ginosko Literary Journal. She is a student of The Writers Studio in New York City and is a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild, Coastal Writers, and the Eastern Shore Writers Association.
Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print and is the author of numerous books of poetry. His latest full-length book, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.
Nancy Levinson is author of a poetic memoir, Moments of Dawn, and a chapbook, The Diagnosis Changes Everything, as well as some thirty books for young readers. She is a Pushcart nominee for an anthologized CNF and was recently honored in the ( 2025 ) October Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in Rat’s Ass Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Hamilton Stone Review, Silver Birch Press, Jewish Literary Journal, Ink in Thirds, The Jewish Writing Project, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.
Jeremy Mauser is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. His poetry and prose can be found, or is forthcoming, in Eggplant Emoji, sneaker wave magazine, and Cloudscent Journal, among other publications. He is an Assistant Fiction Editor at the Black Warrior Review, an amateur stand-up comic, and a self-proclaimed Oscars trivia expert who can be found on Instagram @jamauser13 and Bluesky @jeremymauser.bsky.social.
Tim Mayo’s poems have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations, and his second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, Montréal, 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Montaigne Medal and for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His subsequent chapbook, Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books, 2019) won Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook contest. He lives in Brattleboro, VT where he works in a mental institution and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Jason Melvin is a father, husband, grandfather, and metals processing center manager. His writing has appeared in Roi Faineant, The Beatnik Cowboy, Mad Swirl, Olney, Punk Noir, Rat’s Ass Review and others. His first book, Wrong Things, is available courtesy of Bullshit Lit. His second book, Brother, will soon be published by Anxiety Press. He can be found on X @Jason5Melvin, Instagram @JasonMelvin5 and on his website at jasonmelvinwords.weebly.com.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, A Troubling of Goldfish, is from Big Table Books. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.
JK Miller is a former third grade dual language teacher. He lives on the edge of cornfields. In the summer of 2025 he completed a solo 1,335-mile bike ride from his house to his son’s house to see his newborn grandson. He is the first prize winner of the 2025 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. His poetry has been recently featured in shoegaze literary, Midsummer Dream House, Harrow House, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Academy of the Heart and Mind, among others.
Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Heiress, Zorba’s Daughter (May Swenson Poetry Award), Moon and Mercury, and three chapbooks. Still Life with Timex won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Alias Irene will be published in August 2025. A native of Chicago, she currently lives in Alexandria, VA.
Nina Nazir (she/her) is a British Pakistani poet, writer and fine artist based in Birmingham, UK. She has been widely published online and in print, more recently with The Ekphrastic Review and Ink Sweat and Tears. She is also a Room 204 writing cohort with Writing West Midlands. You can usually find her with her nose in a book or on Instagram: @nina.s.nazir. She blogs regularly at www.sunrarainz.wordpress.com
Cover Artist Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He creates oil paintings, illustrations, ceramics and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries throughout Maine. To view his online portfolio, visit @donald.patten on Instagram.
Tom Probasco has had poems published in the Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, the INverse Poetry Archive, and in several Indiana Writers Center publications, including Flying Island. In addition to writing the occasional poem, he plays harmonica in the Indianapolis band True North.
David Ram’s recent poems appear in Amethyst Review, Meat for Tea: Valley Voices, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, unearthed, and elsewhere. David retired from teaching community college and lives with his wife in western Massachusetts, where he practices poetry writing, rowing and grandparenting.
Amy Riddell is the author of two poetry collections, Bullets in the Jewelry Box (FutureCycle Press) and Narcissistic Injury, a chapbook (Pudding House Publications). A Pushcart nominee, Amy has poems in the current issue of The Inflectionist Review (#20) and poems forthcoming in The Orchards Journal of Poetry, Rust & Moth, and The South Florida Poetry Journal. Her previous publishing credits include Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in The Ecological Citizen, Macrame Literary Journal and The Ekphrastic Review. Previously he worked as a lawyer and arbitrator, has served in the State Department, and taught as an adjunct at the Georgetown and University of Washington schools of law. Michael lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Donald Sellitti was a scientist/educator at a Federal medical school before turning to poetry following his retirement. His publications in medical journals such as Cancer Research and Oncology Letters have been succeeded by publications in a number of more amusingly titled journals, including Better Than Starbucks, The Alchemy Spoon, Door is A Jar, Gyroscope Review, Ink in Thirds, and Rat’s Ass Review, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize.
Anushka Sen is originally from Kolkata, India and now teaches English Literature at Loyola University, Chicago. She is drawn to musicality, animals, and a strong sense of place in art. She occasionally translates from Bengali to English and her poems (original and translated) have been published in Rust and Moth the Asymptote blog, and Eunoia Review, among other places.
Mary Sesso‘s latest chapbook has just been published by Kelsay Press.
Heidi Slettedahl is a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. She has been published in a variety of online literary journals. Her collection of poetry, Mo(u)rning Rituals, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. Her most unusual talent is her ability to ride a unicycle.
Paul Smith writes poetry & fiction. He lives in Skokie, Illinois with his wife Flavia. Sometimes he performs poetry at an open mic in Chicago. He believes that brevity is the soul of something he read about once, and whatever that something is or was, it should be cut in half immediately.
Alec Solomita’s fiction and poetry have appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Panoplyzine, Lothlorien, Litbreak, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Oddball Magazine, The Galway Review, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017. His full-length poetry book, “Hard to Be a Hero,” was released in 2021 by Kelsay Books. He’s just finishing up his second full-length book of poetry.
Galen Steele enjoys being a proud father, a squirrelly son, a weird uncle, a rambunctious friend, and a grateful husband. He amuses himself by scribbling poems into the margins of contracts, reports, and church bulletins. He writes poetry, memoir, and the occasional play. His prior work has been published in Fireflies’ Light, the Book of the Year for the Poetry Society of Texas, and his debut collection of poetry Five Things (2025).
Dan Thompson (PhD) is a former editor and professor whose poetry, personal essays, articles, and reviews have been published in scholarly as well as literary journals, including, most recently, Canary, Eclectica, Black Coffee Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others. In an earlier life, he worked as a music producer for educational videos and as a disc jockey at a country music radio station.
Susan Thornton lives and works in Binghamton New York where she has been employed as a copy writer for a utility company, an editor for an academic press, and a high school teacher of French. Her work has also appeared in Foothills Review and Blackbird.
Rebecca Weigold’s poetry has appeared in BlazeVox, The Ekphrastic Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, and more. Two of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has participated in the famous Chicago Poetry Slam at The Green Mill, hosted by Marc Smith. She lives in Kentucky.
Kit Willett is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.
Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, One Art, Loch Raven Review, Panoply, Rat’s Ass Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The New Verse News, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.