“Aspen Daisies”

by Krista Bergren-Walsh

Spring fights for purchase 

through melting snow on 

ancient mountains circled 

around a malachite green lake. 

From their remembered roots, 

purple and blue aspen daisies

grow, their bright tiny petals

unfurling for busy bumblebees

and colorful butterflies. 

Their yellow discs offering 

up nectar for green and pink

hummingbirds. Stumbling

in her big red snow boots, 

small fat fingers yanking

at their fresh hard stems, 

a young child tugs and pulls. 

She hopes to bring a 

fistful of flowers to her 

beloved mom, to be placed

in a small glass sparkling vase,

 later dried out and 

hung upside down from

the porch, pretending they 

are from the olden days. 

Aspen daisies smelling 

like the promise of summer,

the warmth of the sun and

fresh breezes dancing across

pine trees ripe with sap drizzling

down colorful bark. 

A raven calls out as 

the daisies bloom, coloring

yellow-green grass with 

the promise of joyful days. 

Krista Bergren-Walsh graduated from Creighton University in 2016 with a major in Creative Writing and Theatre Performance. While in college, she wrote a one-act play, "Diamonds in the Rough" performed for Creighton Theatre's 50th Anniversary and really fell in love with writing. In 2021 she was honored to win 6th place in Writers Digest 90th Annual Competition in the Script Category with her original comedy, "This Play is Utter B.S." She has been very thrilled to have two poems published by Wishbone Words. Krista is very excited to have "Aspen Daises" published by boats against the current. Krista currently lives in the (very cold) Midwest with her wonderful spouse, their four chaotic ferrets, and one very snuggly and clingy kitten. 

“Intruder”

by David Mihalyov

A grackle lands halfway up 

the steep edge of the roof

and slowly works its way down,

rotating its head in quick jerks

to see if anything objects

to its presence. A quick drop 

to a wire, and then a hop 

into the opening under the eaves

where a nest has been built.

A smaller black bird speeds 

from a nearby maple and enters the nest, 

the grackle hightailing it out; 

a trespasser, I suppose, looking 

for a home where the hard work 

had already been done.

David Mihalyov lives outside of Rochester, NY, with his wife, two daughters, and beagle. His poems and short fiction have appeared in several journals, including Concho River Review, Dunes Review, Free State Review, New Plains Review, and San Pedro River Review. His first collection, A Safe Distance, will be published by Main Street Rag Press in Spring 2022.

“small acts of rebellion”

by Hilary Otto

to let a train pass without boarding
to stand still on an emptying platform
to allow the rush to flow around you
to amble towards the jammed exit
and pass the barriers humming
to saunter out into the street
to tear your eyes from the light
in your palm and raise them briefly
past the walls looming on all sides
to find the small gap of blue above you
stretching right up to the edge
of the earth’s atmosphere
where the particles escape

Hilary Otto is an English poet based in Barcelona, where she reads regularly in both Spanish and English. Her work has featured in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Popshot, As It Ought To Be, and The Blue Nib, among other publications. She was longlisted for the Live Canon 2021 International Poetry Prize, and her first pamphlet is forthcoming from Hedgehog Press in 2022. She tweets at @hilaryotto.

“domesticus tranquilis”

by John Dorroh

I like towns whose streets are named for trees -

Elm, Olive, Cypress, their canopies spreading

tender clutch above the rooftops 

of homes that pulse with life: sleepy drivers

leaving protected carports before the sun infuses

its muted light through uncurtained windows.

Robust Colombian wafting through thumb-sized

holes in neglected corners that someone forgot to patch 

again last summer. The silent stuffed cheeks of the gray mouse

who just left her evidence in a torn bag of snacks,

potato chip crumbs strewn throughout the dresser drawer.

Squirrels tight-rope skidding across sagging utility lines

like gravity doesn’t matter. And teenagers waking up

like zombies in tattered, smelly nests from wee-hour escapades, 

praying it’s the weekend with a car of their own.

I like to drive down tree-lined streets and make-believe

that I am one of them, just for a day, looking up 

into naked branches at a gray-white sky, lifting my foot off the gas,

waiting for the fog to lift, for the other foot to drop.

It always does.

I like the way that some of them are labeled to let you know

what it is, its genus and species, always in Italics 

since everyone speaks Latin these days. Acer rubrum,

Quercus rubra, Picea pungens. It is paramount to be able

to classify things and put them in their places. Like leaves.

It gives us some sort of short-term power, a way to complicate

the uncomplicated. 

I like how the man on Sycamore Street is always grilling.

Except early in the morning when he’s probably at the market

selecting his meat of the day. The trees above his house 

are always yellow in the summer and are the first to fall

in August. Maybe they can’t breathe.

And when I go into the city it makes me sad to see trees

lined up against glass-and-chrome buildings, forced to grow

in chemical soil, where noise from the interstate never stops. 

They miss the rooftops and dogs that bark down the street in the fog, 

the sounds of the school bus opening its hungry mouth to swallow

children until 3 o’clock when once again it spits them out

at 254 Oak Avenue.

John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano or caught a hummingbird. However, he managed to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Two of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, and Selcouth Station. His first chapbook comes out in 2022.

“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.