2 poems

by Doryn Herbst

Dead End Road

On a grassy ledge above the scoured, stony-grey beach,

four of us meet for a picnic, best of friends.

The quiche is fluffy, sandwiches cut into triangle,

wine as cool as the wind.

Waves that break on the shore keep their time for no one.

A gulf widens, covered by another tumbler

of now lukewarm wine.

Monosyllabic answers, swallowed smiles.

Sentences hung on hooks, and not by accident,

drive every story down dingy, dead-end roads

with only the flame of ancient gaslights.

In a gauze-covered sky, geese cry out,

fly in formation.

Vultures

The first birds to circle

beckon their friends.

Vultures have the beak

to peel back the skin

of an elephant, the stomach

to swallow and break down

infested flesh.

Without these acts, thousands

upon thousands of beasts

would rot in open graves,

leaching malady into the earth.

Vultures of the human kind

do not wait for their victims

to be dead.

Doryn’s writing considers the natural world but also darker themes of domestic violence and bullying. Doryn has poetry in Fahmidan Journal, The Dirigible Balloon, CERASUS Magazine, Sledgehammer Literary Journal and more. She is a reviewer at Consilience science poetry journal.

“noting nothing”

by Viktor Tanaskovski

No thing would be sacred if
scared of being scarred,

Think not you should knot each thing
With threads of foolish wit.

Though the right path could be tough,
Wittiness will find its witness.

Then the bitter taste will taste better than
Dinner lacking dessert in a desert diner.

Now that you know how,
Can it while you can;

Keep away from the keen
Narrow views, sly to the marrow.

Very few of them will vary,
Some will ever stay the same;

And the way they used to be used to use is, in the end,
Quite an easy way to quit and keep quiet.

If they don’t back off of it,
Culture will become a vulture.

Older overt occult cults compulsively obsessed over order -
Feed not its need with a seed of their deed.

Could your synapses reveal the synopsis behind the cloud?
An aesthetic anesthetic cures this curse.

Viktor Tanaskovski is a musician and music teacher from Skopje, North Macedonia. He graduated jazz guitar at “Goce Delcev” university in Stip, in 2016, and at the moment he is studying for a Masters's degree in Applied music research at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, Serbia. Currently, he is working on his first book of poetry, which is about to be released by the end of 2022.

“pain and people”

by Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

Pain and people

Shall fade away with the day

Just remember:

The world owes you nothing

But you own your world

Onto yourself.

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi is a Nigerian-based writer, orator, and a veterinary student at the University of Ibadan. He has been trying to pursue his passion for writing by writing multiple genres. He resides presently in Ibadan, Nigeria where He enjoys reading and writing indoors. He has his works published in anthologies.

“Fire Pit”

by Matthew Green

The flames crackle the kindling
And it sounds like you’d expect
If I sit too close
My jeans feel like heat packs
Amid the darkness
Faces glow, ethereal
Like ghosts come to mingle
In handed down camping chairs
And what is spoken is heard
We are heard
It’s sacred almost
This place of damp grass
And tomorrow ash

Matthew Green's poems have appeared in Sledgehammer, and CP Quarterly, among others. He lives in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. See more on Twitter @matthew_green98.

2 poems

by Peggy Hammond

That curve

comes after a straightaway,

a tempting slick

of road begging 

for gunning it,

for rumbling 

mufflers,

for laughing

boys.

This morning

it’s decorated

with three crosses,

not a local

Golgotha,

instead portal

for teenagers,

young lions,

who leapt the

shadowy ravine

between here

and mystery.

Rain-blind 

afternoon,

mother of one

at home, twelve

seconds close,

close enough 

to hear

but not know,

her boy had flown,

no glance back,

no kiss goodbye.

you were gone

by the time

i learned your name.

your only companions

were late august breezes,

western skies

blanketing you

with starshine.

on the run, the boy

who saw your

chest rise and

fall the final 

time, 

who left you

in a forest yellow 

with grief.

i wish you

were still 

snapping photos, 

still posing,

smile 

luminous.

i wish 

i didn’t know 

your name.

Peggy Hammond’s recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Pangyrus, The Comstock Review, For Women Who Roar, Fragmented Voices, The Sandy River Review, ONE ART, Burningword Literary Journal, Dear Reader, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.  A Best of the Net nominee, her chapbook The Fifth House Tilts is due out fall 2022 (Kelsay Books).  Follow her at @PHammondPoetry.

2 poems

by Ace Boggess

After So Long Among Shadows

Second Spring in the virus song.

Seasons of worry, seasons of anger,

now this brightest bloom.

No statewide stay-at-home shutdown

this year, & everywhere 

yellows swirl like pools of light.

One tulip has been bleached white.

The japonica, first time in years,

doesn’t smudge its lipstick in a block of ice.

There is no virus in the garden,

but life we struggle to maintain 

although fleeting amidst

battering wind & pummeling rain.

Could be no beauty without entropy.

Creation is the power to destroy.

News of the Laughing God

News of a killing, news of the possibility

of war in the warming new year.

Death increases its odds again.

Death smells like dust cooking

on the TV I watch for news 

of the possibility of war, news

a god will save us from our self-

fulfilling destiny of death & death, &

I’d rather be tuned in to a much-

loved sci-fi movie about war

elsewhere, death elsewhere—escape

to otherness of lights, colors, sounds

not real. Truth comes in the night,

reveler drawn to the wrong address.

It brings news of a killing, news of possibility

we built a bomb out of silence,

turned the TV cameras on to catch 

the saving god who laughs & points 

at fire as if a funny thing

happened on the way to Armageddon.

Ace Boggess is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

“Southbound”

by Rebecca Siegel

Let’s say the morning began

in a snow globe and we rode

in a comet’s tail. Let’s say the

years skate backwards on

the ice of ancient oceans. Let’s

say the best of us is traveling

down some Ontario highway

with the sunset over our shoulders

and the painted stripes piling up

like treasure. Let’s say some parts

of the future never happened,

the hard ones and the ones 

where we couldn’t look each

other in the eye. Let’s say,

frog of my heart, my own

heart, that the ship is waiting

in the harbor, fully fitted,

its hold filled with canned 

peaches, pemmican, lamp oil,

barking dogs. Let’s say the day

starts sunlit between the snow,

the leads are open in the ice

just a little longer. Let’s say we

can make it south before winter

freezes our gaps and traps us, 

before we learn how to hurt

each other in fresh ways. Let’s

say we begin in some frosted

past, our breath wet on the

glass, full steam ahead.

Rebecca Siegel lives and writes in Vermont. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Moist Poetry Journal, Visual Verse, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, PoemCity Montpelier, Dust Poetry Magazine, Analog Magazine, Goat’s Milk Magazine, Zócalo Public Square, Container's Multitudes series, Straight Forward Poetry, and elsewhere.

“(Waterfall) (Weathervane) Template”

by Beth Gordon

Tune the piano to left-handed scales.

Practice waterfall scenes in acrylic 

or chalk. Choose the palette with care. Wheat 

brick yellow, mercurochrome red: understand

these decisions will haunt you tomorrow.

Save your ethical quandary for the dark 

room door. To open is to extinguish

with light. The tunnel. The time bomb chewing

through necessary shades of green: pinwheel 

lime and forest floor. Do not consider

windmills or weathervanes. Spinning is death

in disguise. Paint parallel lines of highways

and corn fields as seen from thirty thousand

feet. Sketch the eight exit signs on this plane.

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the OrisonAnthology. She is the author of two previous chapbooks, and her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Her third chapbook, The Water Cycle, is being published by Variant Lit in February 2022. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.

“The Sounds of Night Instead”

by Koss

sick of my own morbidity—death a non-stop

loop over three loss-filled years

I turn to consider crickets as they pitch

their winged violas in September's early threat

there are 800 species—how could we know

their differences by their songs so low 

and synchronous—death-sweet and seeping 

through papered nocturne walls 

they sing together as they know things

each low-bowed wing strokes its upper half

in self-contained lovemaking

they sing, they sing their distant cricket 

symphony while the world slumbers

knowing when winter comes

it’s time to fold their tiny corpses 

into earth

whereas the stealth house crickets—so clever

defy you with their will to live all winter 

singing acapella “now—now—now” 

and “live” 

from their hidden plots

Koss (they/them/she) is a queer writer and artist with an MFA from SAIC. She has work in or forthcoming in Diode Poetry, Five Points, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Prelude, Chiron Review, North Dakota Quarterly, San Pedro River Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Rogue Agent, Rat’s Ass Review, Kissing Dynamite, Schuylkill Valley Dispatches, and many others. She also has work in Best Small Fictions 2020 and Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Koss just won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Award with “My Therapist Sez” and received BOTN nominates in 2021 for fiction (Bending Genres) and poetry (Kissing Dynamite). Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Her website is http://koss-works.com.

“Pineapple Stain”

by Eric Burgoyne

The blood dropped in crimson 

dots easily wiped away

though gone the pain remained

amber shaded, the textured pineapple

skin’s rounded cuts always most difficult

each point of the diamond shapes

so easily broken while hand cutting

swearing and hoping the neighbors

didn’t hear through open windows

crown leaves bold but simple

deadly large, jade hued shards 

angled with emerald as complement

bold waves of cerulean meshed

with Persian blue carefully soldered

below azure and sapphire sky pieces 

forming a cloud hinted heaven

twenty years hence my finger stings

of surgical slice and burn of molten lead

while gazing at the prickly glass fruit

in the transom above still hovering

between heaven and earth

Eric Burgoyne lives, surfs and writes from his home on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. He has an MA in Creative Writing - Poetry, from Teesside University, Middlesbrough England, and an MBA from the University of Reading, Berkshire, England. His poems have been published in The Dawntreader, Spillwords, Sledgehammer, Skink Beat Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere.

“Zeus’ Garden”

by Amir Deen

He tended toward walking through the garden in old 

Age. Strong yet strange in his growing lack of certainty

Servants no longer pleased him in recent days -

Days that seemed no different than those passed.

Hitherto he was a divine despot,

An antihero of a different path

Pleading with himself for a new development

In the story. 

The man would sit next to his fountain

Wade his hand through the water 

And try not to recognize the reflection

He saw. So he grabbed his bronze

Discus and dropped it like a dish.

Scanned the water until he 

Found his face and said:

“I wish to forget the reflection of that man,

For I intend to be something much different.”

Amir Deen lives in San Diego and has a Bachelor’s degree in Literature and Writing.

“A February Forcing”

by Jen Feroze

At the door of the low, cold shed the pickers pause, 

and they look up at the cloud-clogged sky.

They light their thick, cream candles

then enter their cathedral hushed, heads bowed.

They look up at the cloud-clogged sky,

preparing for another twilit morning.

They enter their cathedral hushed, heads bowed,

and walk among the gently crimson stalks.

Preparing for another twilit morning,

now and then they stoop to pull and twist, 

walking among the gently crimson stalks,

that pinkly creak and pop toward their lights.

And now and then they stoop to pull and twist, 

guided by their thick, cream candles.

A harvest pinkly creaks toward the flames.

Silent in the low, cold shed, the pickers pause.

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex, UK, with her husband and two small sleep thieves. She's inspired by the seemingly everyday, and likes to write with a stubborn upswing of hope in her work. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Madrigal, Capsule Stories, The 6ress and Hyacinth Review, among others. Her first collection, The Colour of Hope, was published in 2020. 

“Playing Dead” and “Zelda Fitzgerald: Dear Scott”

by Kitty Donnelly

Playing Dead 

When hope’s a loose leaf pressed 

between two dark pages, 

pick a gravestone, lie down. 

Feel cold’s conduction 

rise from hollowed bones 

into your marrowed, living bones. 

Stay, unflinching. 

Watch winter sun shrouding, 

unveiling, shrouding. 

Think of the drink  

with your name on it, waiting;

your book stalled 

on the crux of revelation. 

Dawn will crown despite 

your void: its downpour pressing 

you under languageless soil. 

Nothing but your words can do you justice. 

They are your loss-defence. 

Don’t leave me to imagine them. 

Zelda Fitzgerald: Dear Scott

I gave our marriage all I had, which was myself. 

You recorded my aphorisms, syllable by syllable. 

I found your female characters soluble, 

remote, with princess tendencies; 

want of hardship gifting their expressions 

the privilege you mistook for beauty.

Who owns my voice? I thought I might 

presume I did without debate or copyright.

You buy silence with tennis lessons, not sanity.

You stride in – a whiff of gin & polished leather; 

lean against my bolted widow, flick ash in my vase.

Who are you anyway? You address a creation

that has veered from your storyline. 

Who am I? When we meet in the asylum garden,

the moon will have bleached my hair 

back to the spilled dark gold it was 

the night we lay on Montgomery gravestones 

unripe with youth, two hoarders of dreams. 

Kitty Donnelly's first collection, 'The Impact of Limited Time', was the joint-winner of the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition. Her second collection is due to be published in 2022. She was nominated for a Jerwood Compton Fellowship in 2021 & has had poems published in The Rialto, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, Mslexia, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, amongst other publications. She has written reviews for Mslexia Max, The Beautiful Space, Poets Directory & The Tupelo Quarterly. 

“Coronet”

by Riley Monahan

Crisp, clean, almost minty.

Our arrival here smells of dewy mountains and lush green,

of endless space.

Three days in and I’ve forgotten how it feels

to breathe any other kind of air, 

my lungs accustomed to the clearing, pupils dilated,

nostrils fresh.

Snow falls off the peak, gracefully preparing for a new spring,

I feel that way here too.

Letting go of all things past and polluted; 

exhale cloudy, crowded, dense,

inhale crisp, clean, mint.

Riley Monohan hails from Queensland, Australia with a Bachelor's Degree in Social Work. She is employed in a non-profit organization supporting people living with disabilities and mental health. Some of her favorite things are the beach, breakfast for dinner, reading, and her dog, Ringo. Riley is currently undergoing postgraduate study in creative writing and hopes to one day be a published author. 

“Ruskin and the Smoke Stacks”

by Jack B. Bedell

He saw in the smoke billowing out

of factory chimneys the grinning

maws of gods eager to eat

all forests bare and poison the rivers 

flowing through his countryside

with the pulp spat out. He knew

these factories were built 

less on the land than 

into it and could sense the filth

seeping from the buildings’

bricks into the dirt. There was

no warning he could give

that was not already known—

from this dirt we rose,

and to this dirt we will return.

How lovely would it be

to go to ground with hope

the countryside might remain?

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Bracken, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, and other journals. His most recent collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019. 

“tied to the idea of the sun”

by Naomi

We pray to the sun, to all that comes with the knowledge of the days. 

Trying to write you down, describe and capture your worth of warmth, 

is a futile aim that one should not try. 

The heat has shown us the outcome of such days like these, as the foliage grows 

weary from the lack of promised rain. 

From underfoot, Irish salt sea aroma digs its way into the belly of the Burren, 

Unlike Sevilles heat - those burnt lost love letters between lands. 

They are at home there, placed in the foreign warm earth that welcomes.

Naomi is a degree holder in Business & Arts Management, & has been active on the poetry scene for many years. She regularly publishes poetry on her Facebook and Twitter page, ‘LiterallyWords’, which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/Literallyw0rds. She has been published by various papers, such as the Tealight Express in their 2021 May Issue, Star Sign issue and their Symmetry issue. Her work has also been published by the Magpie Review, Poetry in Bloom, in the 6th and 7th issue of Analogies and Allegories literary magazine, in the first issue of Tir Editors, the first issue of Wilder Lit, as well as in the Greystones Poetry Trail in 2020 and 2021. She is currently working on getting a collection of her poems published in the upcoming year.

“pretty glass frames”

by Sofia Wasserman

Pretty glass frames view pretty desperate gestures  

My pretty glass frames watch the light bounce off her spectacles 

Her pretty glass frames appreciate the subtle curve to my lashes 

But I ignore these pretty glass frames to seek dark tinted panels 

The dark tinted panels always filter out my pretty bloodstained beauty 

Sofia Wasserman is a high school student in Arizona who loves to write and hopes to become a future English teacher. Her preferred medium of expression is acrylic paint, but also enjoys writing poetry. 

3 poems

by Mira Cameron

a lost self finds the end of a day 

fragmented can

diet coke and sangria

apathy

an attempt to lose

myself on the train ride home.

apathy becomes intent

intent becomes a hole

sangria becomes whiskey

this is the order I know

if I want the pain to go away

why do I put it into my body

pouring gasoline on a fire

is damage control

eruption, a method to stop.

Dreamscape

i’m in a state of slow, balletic ascent 

floating past the moon 

cloud

the prairie sky open

my vulva spread mirroring 

the vast gash of the milky way

starstruck, my body is lost to necessity 

a spirit’s structure

expressionistic constellations 

shapeshifting requires being willing

to find yourself wherever you are.

lately, i have been

a horde of beetles 

a hero who failed you

a distorted lie 

and a blue jay fallen from its nest.

Academia as a source of a structure

am i smart or a generator 

molded obsessively into an over-achiever

pace of my head emotional

philosophy and stimulant

green-eyed starry consciousness 

refreshed by death

when i solve a moral dilemma

the good and the bad

both come from chasing my head 

but they encourage this.

mechanical without clear identity

able to be controlled / mechanical 

set standard walk 

but these days I limp.

i want to disassemble in the dark.

Mira Cameron is a Chicago-based transgender poet who aims to coat the mundane in her preferred shade of dream. She studies Sustainability and English at Roosevelt University, where she also tutors writing. Her previous work has been published in Slippage Lit and The Corvus Review. She can be found on twitter @nonsensetheimp or instagram @theyippinhorsefly.

“Lessons”

by Maria Tariq

I am here

to listen.

Nourish me.

How can I record

the soft edges

of your nouns,

the lilt of your

vowels?

Your footfalls, never

heavy, stirred the air

to hold our words,

kept the language 

of others safe

at the same time.

Am I wrong when I

let our thoughts slide

crash? Let me rise

knowing you’ll hear

my fixed up

say-so, let us go

make sure the trees

are breathing

let me

walk with you

again.

Maria Tariq is a freelance writer from Houston, Texas. Her experiences as a first-generation immigrant and passion for international human rights inform and inspire her work. 

“The Illusion of Touch”

by Anna Saunders

On our last day together.

you tell me you don’t feel a connection.

Before I leave, we walk in the woods.

Your mind is already elsewhere. 

The river is about to burst its banks,

the rapids throw themselves off the rocks.

When we return to the car

you close out the weather. 

I can still feel the wind on me, I claim.

You shake your head and say

what you think is touch

is merely only the friction of our electrons.

On the train back I marvel

at what magicians are our senses,

tossing down cards that the body will misread.

I think of how contact is really an illusion,

a metaphorical slight of no hands,

how our atoms repel

and the repulsion feels like touch.

Later, lying alone in my cold bed

I can hear you say it again,

how you don’t feel a connection

and - ‘when you thought I kissed you,

our lips didn’t even meet.’

Note: The nerve cells that make up our body send signals to our brain that tell us that we are physically touching something, when the sensation of touch is merely given to us by our electron’s interaction with — i.e., its repulsion from — the electromagnetic field permeating spacetime (the medium electron waves propagate through).

Anna Saunders has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North, ‘a modern myth maker’ by Paul Stephenson, and Tears in the Fence said of her ‘Anna Saunders’ poetry is reminiscent of Plath – with all its alpha achievement and radiance’. She is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams), and Ghosting for Beginners, (Indigo Dreams). Anna’s new book is Feverfew. (Indigo Dreams). The collection has been described as ‘rich with obsession, sensuousness and potency’ by Ben Ray, and as ‘a beautiful and necessary collection’ by  Penny Shuttle. She is also the Executive Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and works as a creative writing tutor and mentor, communications specialist, journalist, broadcaster and copywriter/editor.