Kristin Garth

Kitten Smitten

December starving, throat yowled mute, big eyes
beside his garbage chute; he picks you up, 
in just one hand, pinstriped, bowtied,
a civilized man. His warm fingers cup
you scruff & bones, a stunted youth he thinks
he owns. A baby beast he takes to train —
emaciated, broken brain. You slink
inside his ordered life, penthouse constrained
feral child wife with claws he files & paints
pale pink, instincts he hopes become extinct:
predation, fornication, chewed through restraints, 
ingratitude & nude complaints. Your blink
& thighs belie the fangs, you hide, full grown.  
He would have let you starve if he had known.

 

Kristin Garth is a poet from Pensacola and a sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked magazines like Five: 2: One, Glass, Anti-Heroin Chic, Occulum, Luna Luna, Yes, Former Cactus and many more. Her chapbook Pink Plastic House is available from Maverick Duck Press, and she has two forthcoming: Pensacola Girls (Bone & Ink Press, Sept 2018) and Shakespeare for Sociopaths (The Hedgehog Poetry Press Jan 2019). She also has a full length forthcoming Candy Cigarette (The Hedgehog Poetry Press April 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @lolaandjolie, her weekly poetry column (Rhythm & Bones Lit) and her website (kristingarth.wordpress.com).

Howie Good

Liquid Courage

I was hit with a hammer during an argument over $50. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I had blood all over me. At one point I couldn’t see for a couple of minutes. It would be days before I got home. I passed through a vast space with sun-bleached posters of various leaders on the walls. I slept under bridges, on park benches, out in the woods. Everyone was shocked when I made it back. But, hey, anything can happen. Thousands of gin bottles thrown from German ships in previous centuries are only now reaching shore.

Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.

Lee Potts

Saints Layered like Leaves

Great aunt Jenny Palmer,
brought back from her circuit of
chapels, crypts, and grottoes,
cards made holy by the imposition
of ink and expectation.

Gathered, then left, 
like losing lotto tickets,
for me to slip into forced
hot air heating vents.
The ticks and bangs
from the furnace below
scared me further into piety.
Spinning them into the dark, I prayed
that a little light would carry them a long way
and never once wondered what was burning.

I launched others down gullies
into storm drains. 
I imagined a few made it out to sea,
swallowed up by fish,
and spit back out on the coast where
each could do the most good.

For years, one earned bloodless, 
push pin stigmata, and edified all
through his heroic melancholy
from my bedroom bulletin board.

                  . . . .

Silent now,
prayers finally wound down,
I turn to sleep, 
sheets tangling ankles.
I’m accompanied by a bedside drawer full
of saints layered like leaves,
pressing together lives centuries apart,  
and increasing, with their density, 
the frequency of miracles.

Lee Potts is a poet with work in The Painted Bride Quarterly, Gargoyle, Door is a Jar, and Cold Creek Review. He has two poems forthcoming in Saint Katherine Review. He lives just outside of Philadelphia and you can find him online at leepotts.net.

Emma Lee

The Golden Gate Bridge minus fog

The plane is supported by a balloon of cloud
over Newfoundland before a gentle turn
down to Northern California.
We were expecting the iconic image
of the Golden Gate Bridge hovering on fog.
The mist is absent but the sky is not cloudless.
Wisps scud over Alcatraz
like dreams of a neon-lit nightlife
and the freedom of easy Sundays
carried like a cloud on a breeze.

 

Emma Lee’s most recent collection is Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, UK 2015), she co-edited Over Land, Over Sea: poems for those seeking refuge, (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.

Corey Zielinski

Pigeon Speak

Claims keep assuring that ‘life’ will return,
will recreate past prosperous days,
as if time were finally circling back
and with reward to those who stayed, 
purchased houses, 
supported local bistros and boutiques
when the economy 

sucked. In the fall, I moved north from Allen
to Tonawanda, 
with mostly books, 
slowly, over months, 
insidiously, making a home on fresh shelves,
with my partner, a dog and a yard. 

We plan dinners, together, rearrange furniture, 
organize pillows, purchase containers, Swiffer. 

We eat sandwiches, 
hers with onion, cucumber, and vinaigrette,
collect more books, read some, 
and try to talk differently, with keener language,
listen. 

On odd afternoons, we attend to the pigeons  
gathering in the backyard, 
drink dark liquor, 
and breathe the bizarrely human wail
of a distant train horn.

We consent to being
possessed by weeds, with musk thistle
and crab grass around our ankles, 
sense that a neighborhood grows here,
still without name or purpose,  
requiring the invention of new terms—
and on this absence, we play, improvise
names for a new community
that we will never write down.  

Corey Zielinski is a student of poetry currently residing in Buffalo, NY.

Margot DeSalvo

Degree

Strip awake
futile pressure
where magnetic puddles
formulate
this classified center
of 3 years -
a broken soul
living
on a handout. 
 
Where does
fault reside
when trains are missed
and drowned signals
no longer qualify these echoes? 
 
I’ve searched for myself
in this mall before
but only found disadvantages
among sale racks
unable to purchase
desired identity.
 
Don’t ask me
why I’m
attached
to these inept
perspectives
of measurements
and civility as if
they are acts of grandeur
or hope
a meaningless leap of faith
fabricated to harness
these damaged tissues.

Margot DeSalvo (Ed.M, M.F.A), a college composition and creative writing teacher, is currently working on various writing projects that portray the complexities of depression and the nuances of introspection. Some of her work has been published or is forthcoming in Califragile, Sonic Boom, Clarendon House Publications, The Pangolin Review, Whale Road Review, Soft Cartel, Streetlight Press, Dying Dahlia, Flatbush Review, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. 

Barbara Costas-Biggs

When We Were Young

we bought things like violas without a second thought.

We had lost weekends in Nashville
or our tiki-ed out backyard, no regard

for hangovers.  No need for baby
monitors.  We wore bathing suits. My skin

did not need nightly Retinol. 
When we were young I didn’t feel

so dusty, so slow. Now, I am planning for
a hysterectomy. In bed, you say 

things to me like, You don’t have to prop
your breasts up like that to make them appealing to me.

There’s no reason I shouldn’t believe
you, but I don’t.  When I lie on my back

and my breasts slide down to my sides
leaving my chest flat,

I feel nothing but old. Laden.
It doesn’t matter what my body has done,

it matters what it does not do any more.

Barbara Costas-Biggs is the 2017 winner of the Split This Rock Abortion Rights Poetry Contest. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared recently in Glass, The Coil, Riggwelter, MORIA, JARFLY, Dodging the Rain, Bird’s Thumb, District Lit, Literary Mama, and others. She lives in Southern Ohio, and can be found online at www.barbwrites.com, facebook.com/barbarabiggs, and sporadically on Twitter @bcostasbiggs.

Tianna Grosch

Gallop Through the Night

Night mares move swift, 
bearing you on sweat-slick
backs, rippling muscles
between thick thighs
carry you through
dark-lit avenues
of memory
skin like coal, 
red burning embers
reach to grasp you
in their heat and
prickle like thorns, 
drops of blood
upon porcelain.

 

Tianna Grosch has been writing her entire life and now resides on her family farm in PA where she spends most of her time weaving tales and poems. Her tapestry often includes dark strands but she likes when the light shines through as well. She is the recent founder and managing editor of Rhythm & Bones Lit (RhythmNBone.com). Check out her widely published work at CreativeTianna.com or follow her tweets @Tiannag92.

Nicholas Boyer

The Sun Has Been Socializing

The trees have been picnicking
And the leaves danced as they fell
while other leaves clung 2 fighting fits of laughter
And the birds were splish-splashing
And the fish were kissing but not telling
And the water told knock-knock jokes
that made the wind snort while
bohemian bark laid out to get a tan
And the ants declared war
against other ants from invading tree lines
And red-faced roses journaled vigorously
shouting in bold font Freedom of Press
And the dandelions said  I  can’t   b r e e e a t h

The grass branded the Sun as a socialist
and the Moon muttered Commie grass.
Which sprouted a green refutation that
We ought to regulate those blades.
     GRASS ROOTS
     GRASS ROOTS
     GRASS ROOTS
And the butterflies collected social security
from the caterpillars who filed their taxes
And the cocoons went on strike
when the mosquitoes became radicalized
after centuries of being swatted
And the clouds did not cry

Nicholas Boyer spent 6 years in the USAF with one tour overseas. After finishing his military service, Nicholas moved to Alaska and lived in a dry cabin for a year, searching for himself and creating art. Currently Nicholas studies philosophy and his poetry’s content varies in subject matter from war & politics, appreciation & questions of existence, to love poems written to lamps.

Tohm Bakelas

The Humble Duster

down in Laredo
he stands between San Bernardo Ave
and interstate35
sometimes he stands elsewhere
sometimes he stands nowhere
he stands like an old wooden Indian chief smoking a cigar
draped in his black duster
it is unknown if any clothes exist beneath the encompassing duster. 
when we saw him it was 103 degrees
dry blazing heat
no humidity
no breeze either

some say he is a homeless tweaker who stands seeking his meth
some say he is an arsonist who burned his family to ash
and fled to Laredo to have a new life
others say he's not even there at all
but i have seen him
standing in Laredo
i think he's a messenger from god
the Humble Duster is holier than you
and i
and he will remain in Laredo
at the intersection of San Bernardo Ave and interstate35
standing as the sun sets on the city under seven flags

Tohm Bakelas works as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He is the singer of Permanent Tension and runs Forced Abandonment Records when he feels like it. He was born in New Jersey, currently resides there, and will die there.

Kate Garrett

In the brown Camaro

I was forever little. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was only five years old, and I was less than, all eyes, dark curls and a half-smile like a pinched bud, unable to bloom even in the bright beams through the open windows. Her holy voice—a lilt of gospel and lullabies—set free to fly behind us on the interstate, my head turned to watch the scent of endless trees melt into the round notes, sharp syllables. Her makeup and her manicure camera-ready. Near the turn of the next decade, her manicurist will also be a gymnastics teacher, and I won’t be asked if I want to tumble and jump like their exotic pet monkey, but I’ll do it anyway. The other girls will wear neon and spandex, new leotards, but I’ll be wearing sweatpants six months too small. It turns out ability is less important than uniform. But now I am little and riding in a glitter-gilded car she will one day sell, I am loving my mother with an openness she slams shut, in a space I can never be pardoned for occupying. Her holy voice a kiss on my cheek as she rolls up her window. Her perfume wraps my shoulders where her arms cannot.

Kate Garrett writes and edits. She is the founding/managing editor of four online journals, including Picaroon Poetry. Her poetry is widely published online and in print, most recently or forthcoming in formercactus, Riggwelter, Anti-Heroin Chic, Atrium, and Burning House Press. Her latest pamphlets are You've never seen a doomsday like it (Indigo Dreams, 2017) and Losing interest in the sound of petrichor (The Black Light Engine Room, 2018). She was born and raised in southern Ohio, but moved to the UK in 1999, where she lives happily/grumpily ever after (depending on the day) in Sheffield with her husband, five children, and a sleepy cat.

Mia Aguilera

Deep in Summer

It is June again, & here I am
letting monsoon soak through the window. 

I am steeped in slowness
wanting only to feel ocean spray
on my feet as you walk in front of me.

There are long walks after it rains
& bus rides to the movie theatre.
There is enough time to make crepes. 

Here I am, drinking unsweetened black tea
with a hint of elderflower. Holding a book
I’ve read many times before. 
Hoping later you will taste the black cherry
ice cream on my tongue.

What am I doing, still craving your flesh
though it is long gone.
I want to feel your breath in my mouth,

hear you say you’ll be here in the morning.
& I will be in the kitchen, 
cooking eggs & peeling grapefruit.

Here I am, wearing yellow
so you notice me. 

There is little but this small bedroom
where I watch mushrooms cluster
in the damp soil.

Here I am, deep in summer.
Who do I ask to fill up the space.

Mia Aguilera received an MFA from Northern Arizona University. She has been published in Lux, The Normal School Review, and River Teeth's "Beautiful Things" column. She likes to write about dreams.

Greg Casale

His Final Shot

I regret the future
unphotographed.   

I had visions
of more:

architecture, taxidermy, the projects,
Chinatown butchers, shrines in Mexico City

and Naples, Istanbul’s spice market men sipping tea
mustaches wet on the rim, leather daddies

bloodied in Berlin, Paris heroin hustlers, smoking
limbs on the Ganga’s shores, I always return

to the dark gods. In my youth, 
I bought a one-way ticket 

to Hades, handcuffs and cum all the way, 
and now my train’s pulling into the station, 

and I want
one more picture. 

                                                                     – For Robert Mapplethorpe

Greg Casale is an award-winning writer and journalist who has written for the Washington Blade, Lambda Literary and the Phoenix New Times, among other publications. Poetry publications include Origins Literary Journal, Bayou Magazine, Arkana, HIV Here & Now and Under A Warm Green Linden.

Peycho Kanev

The Silence

I lay on my back in the field
watching the stars in the sky,
flickering like billions of fireflies, even more, a lot more
and the bottle of wine is empty
and I think of all this connecting us
with the fiber of time…

Thinking,
for how long?
And why,
why?

There is no exact answer
or at least one that we could understand. 

And I’m thinking also:
what is the point of all this?

But then I remember what Issa said:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and two chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others. He has three nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

Esther Vincent

everything is perfect from far away

coffee turning cold outdoors;
that was a first. temperate trees in the sub-tropics
(I swear they were coniferous). paddling in a pedalo
on Xuan Huong lake,
we bought ourselves wings with loose change
             but our feet never left the water.

like children feverish
for their first taste of ice-cream, we jumped naked
into a heated pool & our lungs turned to ice. on the hotel grounds, 
a stray mongrel showed us
that Maslow was right when he devised the hierarchy --
             the body’s needs came before love.

I picked up scattered pine cones
on the slab stone pavement, only to find out
three months later they had grown scales and were ovulating
pollen. do you remember
the flowers painting their faces
             a different shade of Spring all year round? 

when I close my eyes, the countryside is a happy blur
and a cool, dry breath. I enter the rooms
of the Hằng Nga Crazy House on all fours
and when I look down I find myself crouching
on Elephant Falls in broken slippers,
             afraid of falling into the coffee cups of young lovers.

Esther Vincent teaches Literature at the School of the Arts, Singapore. She is co-editor of Little Things, an anthology of poetry for adolescents, and the accompanying Teachers' Guide (Ethos Books, 2013). Her poems have been published locally and internationally in Dissident Voice, The Journal of Remembered Arts, Eastlit, Feminine Collective, Into the Void, Luminous Echoes, New Asian Writing, Unhomed, Sound of Mind, Little Things and Ceriph #4. She currently reads for Frontier Poetry.

Lawrence Mullen

trans bodies are anomalies

bones fracture and snap
you’ve got to cast them together
grab some plaster cast
your anatomy textbook

my home is falling apart
i mean look
the tiles are trickling off the roof
through the vacant gaps
from the sinking wooden rafters
the glass from the windows
has eroded back to sand

lead dust is falling out of my ribs
a coke bottle fell through my pelvis

i’m all wired together
how do you expect me to speak
i don’t have a jaw

throw a sheet over me for now
the teaching hospital
the morgue
has enough of me
no not that sheet
the clean cotton one
i’ll make a nice forgotten-about lamp

Lawrence Lorraine Mullen is a non-binary Philadelphia-based poet and graduate student pursing an MFA in Poetry. They have been published in Crab Fat, Pomona Valley Review, GTK Creative, and Spiral Poetry I.

James H. Duncan

hidden by the smell of flowers

4 a.m. and the water drips down
from the long ripples in the ceiling
things like unhealed scars
 
the water collecting in the bucket
reeks of vomit and rot, of ancient
pipes and molding sheetrock
 
it has soaked into the mattress
where we used to sleep and sometimes
try to talk about why it wasn’t
as good as it used to be
 
we didn’t know it at the time, but
the stench of rot and vomit
was in the air there as well
 
hidden by the smell of flowers in
the vase on the nightstand, and by the
night air vibrating through the window
with the sound of car doors closing
and of highways, crickets, prayers
 
at all hours of the night, our life
 
and now it is 4 a.m. again
it has always been 4 a.m. again
the air is still and the stink
is still here
while you are not
 
tap—tap goes the water
in the bucket as the streetlights
hum in dawns coming light
 
you were right, we were wrong
and the water keeps falling

 

James H. Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and the author of We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, a new collection of poetry from Unknown Press. His work has appeared in Writer's Digest, Drunk Monkeys, American Artist, Five:2:One and other publications. For more about his books and reviews, visit www.jameshduncan.com.

Fred Whitehead

the dive poet

I used to see him here
wearing smoke

         monk like
         beneath
         the honeyed glow
         of backlit bottles

this was
before younger folks straggled in
attracted by legend or curiosity

               - outer ring types
               who took up pitchforks
               for pristine lungs and the fight
               for a longer measure of time    
               the scent
               of sweet pea shampoo could     
               linger about their
               as yet     
                           unweighted shoulders

the likes of these drove out the smoke
as well as most of his kind
       driven out
       or home
       or mad

I'd sidle up to him
when the crowd was thin
and try the small talk

he'd be bent over a beer and notepad
all broken teeth and narrowed eye
fingertips as yellow
as the journalism of his youth

       he never offered up much

an opinion maybe
on the home team’s performance
warnings against
misdeeds and miscalculations
and the debilitating effect
of unstructured thought
      it was enough

he never talked about his work though
and I never asked

which may well be the only reason
he paid for a round
        from time to time

 

Fred Whitehead is a lifelong native of Western New York. He has authored nine volumes of poetry. He is currently the host of a monthly poetry series at Dog Ears Bookstore & Café, which he has happily done since 2010. He also sporadically publishes chapbooks through his Destitute Press.

Winston Plowes

Making Soup for Rachel

I have traded my silver
for fresh vegetables
under the red and white striped awnings
at the Thursday outdoor market
and I have made soup to feed your soul:
I have twisted the first spring notes of petrichor
between the leaves of curly kale
and stuffed tomatoes with the yellow flashes
of wagtails that flitted on the river.
Tender chunks of aubergine
cooled by wafting mermaids tails
are waiting for your spoon.
The sweetest of emotions
will gush down flumes of celery
calmed by the dark green dimples
on slices of savoy.
Translucent slivers of white onion
have been hand tied into lovers knots
and musical beans will squeak symphonies
that play upon your teeth.
And for your holidays
I have included a return ticket to Shangri-La
written in pink Moroccan salt
on the skin of a sweet red pepper.

 

Winston Plowes lives aboard his floating home in Calderdale which doubles as a home for lost and wayward words. He is a teacher of creative writing at primary schools and universities. His collection of surrealist found poetry Telephones, Love Hearts & Jellyfish was published in 2016 by Electric Press. www.winstonplowes.co.uk