“our best boy”

by Lorraine Murphy 

He died while we danced

on a drip while we drank.

Max. Four years old.

In a warm blanket

on a cold New Year's Day

we brought him home. 

Was something he ate

a poisoned mouse or bird.

The circle of death. 

Powerless to change. 

Both scorpion and frog he

died by the hunt. 

We'll bury him when

the torrential rain stops.

Living in Ireland, Lorraine Murphy is a member of the writing group Inklings for many years but is relatively new to the online world of writing. Wife to Brendan and mother to three taller people ranging in ages from 12 to 20, she is the 2022 winner of  Fiction Factory's flash fiction competition. She enjoys flash fiction, short poems and is currently working on her third novel.

“A Day’s Catch”

by Laura Bonazzoli

(After the photograph by Berenice Abbott)

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. 

–Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Is the day’s catch the herring, surfaced, 

frantic for the sweep of tides to swell

again their fallen gills? 

Is it the pleasure of the men, eyes intent, 

muscles flexed against the net, 

twisted and heavy with death?

Or perhaps the photograph itself, 

the culmination of your long 

and ardent morning’s labor— 

not this thin print—I mean that instant 

I’m imagining for you—for them—

of pure and frenzied light. 

Thoreau said every creature is better alive 

than dead, but you—and they—

are part of nature, too, 

swaying on narrow boats, squinting in 

the moment’s allocation of sun

at breathless herring.

Laura Bonazzoli’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Connecticut River Review, Northern New England Review, and Steam Ticket, as well as in four anthologies and on “Poems from Here” on Maine Public Radio. She has also published personal essays and fiction. Her collection of linked short stories, Consecration Pond, is forthcoming from Toad Hall Editions. She is online at laurabonazzoli.com.

2 poems

by Gillian Winn

The Siren

I saw her ride the ebbing tide,

As dawn began to break,

Her transport was a conch shell,

Her steed a water snake,

Her hair was dressed with bladderwrack,

Encrusted all with pearl,

Her dress a garb of water fern,

With verdant fronds a furl,

I watched her with a cautious air,

As she frolicked in the ocean,

Then turned away with sad regret,

With tears of pure emotion.

Stages

At first you will not listen,

You think that you know best,

Wrath then comes a knocking,

Hammering at your chest,

You would trade your life for theirs,

If there was a way,

Sadness envelopes your mind,

With melancholy grey,

As you travel through the hurt,

Your goal is there ahead,

Grief is but a journey long,

Before you, ever spread.

While Gillian Winn is relatively new to poetry, she worked as a nurse for 40 years and now has more time to devote to creative writing. She is passionate about the natural world and nature. She is currently completing a Creative Writing module with the Open University and believes that you are never too old to learn new skills. She is dubbed ‘Nannie Shakespeare’ by her granddaughter! 

“Technicolour Overtone”

by Ben Riddle

I dream in different colour to anything

I see before me -

In my dreams, your eyes are violent,

ultraviolet-like they can see something;

anything beyond the bloodstained

chalk-outlines crocheted across

the chequered sidewalks speaking

their stories, speaking

truth or abstinence,

speaking a tender rejection to this

casual complicity that we

bleed and beg and proffer to one another.

There are no stains on your teeth,

they refract

rainbow rivers

that remind me of hope.

In my dreams, my mother's wrinkles

become jigsaw scars like she put herself

back together so many times

she forgot to take out the sutures.

Mama kept saving for rainy days;

I think by the time it mattered,

she couldn't hear

the storms outside, or

she thought the raindrops were

the pitter patter of working feet

marching, marching back

to work

sick and tired until

that's all that industry ever was;

or she thought the rain on her face

was just sweat on her brow.

She doesn't look up,

anymore. Me? I try not to look forward.

I keep writing these budgets trying

to work out what I can give up

to get out; it keeps looking like

stop buying books for school, or

sell the last parts of

your body. What else do we have

left? Maybe the last thing

you have to give up

or sell is wanting to get out. Maybe

that's why people stay.

I dream in different colours to anything

I see before me -

The most interesting thing about Ben Riddle is that he is building a little library of all the contemporary poetry he can put his hands on. The voices of poets go still too soon. He is the Director of Perth Underground Press.

“Nature’s Night Games”

by Matt McGuirk

Driving roads by the pale yellows of headlights,

down paths that deserve no sign or pinned spot on google maps. 

Trails where trees reach out and touch the fresh paint of the car

like bony joints of skeletons or sharp claws of black cats. 

Roads where clipped fall leaves swoop like wings of a bat or crow

and wind slides through cracks in the stand 

making the car shiver against its draft. 

Fall wanes and soon winter will spit a 

spinning kaleidoscope of snow, 

just another trance thrown by nature’s night games. 

Matt McGuirk teaches and lives with his family in New Hampshire. BOTN 2021 nominee with words in various lit mags and a debut collection with Alien Buddha Press called Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities available on Amazon and linked on his website: http://linktr.ee/McGuirkMatthew 

“Ingrid”

by Constance Mello

I wonder if you sit 

by the pool, in the shade

with your jaw locked.

do you still see him?

out the window on the

right are the hydrangeas

i don’t remember whether 

they are blue or pink

he once took me fishing

but there was no hook

only little lumps of dough 

“get the fish to trust you” 

do you miss him

when the light catches the water

or when the water catches the light?

like diamonds 

like any other river life

flows like wine and 

the cabinet smells like him

like semolina 

the tears over the phone 

when I was ten years old 

you looked at his favorite tree 

and it whispered 

Constance Mello (she/her) is a Brazilian scholar, writer, and teacher. She graduated with a degree in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and is currently pursuing a dual Master’s Degree in English and Creative Writing. Her writing has been published in The Ilanot Review, Fearless She Wrote, and The Ascent, and was a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. 

“Pre Cancer”

by Robin Keehn

My grandfather kept a tank of DDT

in his garage

in Wilmington, California,

even after the silent spring 

and all those dead birds

falling from the sky,

even after soft shells

crumbled under brown pelicans 

nesting for eons 

on the cliffs of Palos Verdes,

crumbled under bald eagles

nesting before America

on Catalina Island.

He unveiled the tank to me 

one day in 1972 when 

I asked about his orchids,

their amazing faces

mouths wide open 

unable to tell me

the secret to their success.

He rationed it out,

he said:

to his orchids

to his fruit trees

to his hydrangeas 

standing guard by 

the front door

flawless lavender

and white,

whispering nonsense, 

he said.

Robin Keehn lives in Encinitas, California.  She teaches literature and writing at Cal State University, San Marcos.  She holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of California, San Diego.

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.