Agnes Vojta: “Darkroom”

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Darkroom

He loves the slow and lonely work.
In the orange glow, he watches
shadows grow on the paper,
darkening shapes blossom.

From his test prints, he knows
how long the photo needs to soak
in the developer, when to move
it to the stop bath, to the fixer.

At the end of the day, ten portraits
will hang on the drying line:
acrobats, jugglers, stilt-walkers,
dancers – street performers, captured

mid-flow. He dislikes poses,
and circus acts that are now
all about break-neck speed.
Speed is not important to him.

He bicycles, travels by train,
eschews the subway, walks instead
unbothered by his luggage – how
can he see if he is underground?

He does not show his photographs.
They cover the walls in his house:
clowns, mimes, and fire-eaters, none
looking towards the audience.

About the Author: Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams, all published by Spartan Press. Together with eight other poets she collaborated on the book Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (Cornerpost Press, 2022.) Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com.

Image Credit: Robert H. McNeill “McNeill’s studio/business – interior of Gem Photo Lab, Washington, D.C” (1949) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress

John Grochalski: “Solace”

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solace

monday morning
and the anxieties pour out of me

noting but
chest pains and stomach cramps

as the morning d.j.
plays something sad
from two centuries ago

i hear a stray cat crying outside

opening the window
i search for him in the moody dawn

but i have no clue why

we can offer each other
no solace today

but just
this strange cold misery

that sometimes touches
every living thing.

About the Author: John Grochalski is the author of five poetry collections, three novels, and the novella Wolves of Berlin Headline Amateur Night at the Flute and Fiddle Pub (Alien Buddha Press 2024). He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Image Credit: Egon Schiele “Landscape with Raven” (1911) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee

Rebecca Schumejda: “Lotus Flower”

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Lotus Flower
- For Jason Martinez

Most people would laugh at the notion
that I loved you long before we met.

They wouldn’t understand how your
deceased partner sent me to you

or how on our first date, you talked to
my late husband in the Starbuck’s bathroom

and promised him you would take care of me–
most people would have run, not walked, run.

But I knew, the explanation was in how
we were both able to rise up from muddy water

and bloom despite our struggles. Most people
would not be able to trace her angelic face

memoralized on your arm or her name
tattooed above your heart while making love.

They wouldn’t be able to admire the half-finished
painting of her, sitting on an easel in your living room.

Most people would not appreciate the constellations
you discovered on my thigh, how I watched you

point out the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and saw
what you saw, and saw you. Most people

wouldn’t understand how after you pushed into me
for the first time I went to my house, and put

a picture of my late husband back up, not because
I wanted him back, because I do, I always will,

but because you turned that door knob, a lotus flower,
pushed in through and past the murky waters,

held me tightly as I let out a deep sigh of relief
after this long journey to you, and welcomed me home.

About the Author: Rebecca Schumejda is the author of several full-length collections including Falling Forward (sunnyoutside press), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books), Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press), Our One-Way Street (NYQ Books) Something Like Forgiveness, a single epic poem accompanied by collage art by Hosho McCreesh (Stubborn Mule Press) and her new collection Sentenced (NYQ Books). She is the co-editor at Trailer Park Quarterly. She received her MA in Poetics from San Francisco State University and her BA from SUNY New Paltz. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family. You can find her online at: rebecca-schumejda.com

Image Credit: Image originally from Flore des serres et des jardins de l’Europe. A Gand: chez Louis van Houtte, eÌditeur,1845-1880. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Royal Rhodes: “Books”

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BOOKS

They line the walls on sagging lumber
    beyond the five-foot shelf of classics.
Dog-eared paperbacks, debris
    depicting what the demi-monde
contains within their shop-worn boards,
    tomes we saved from e-Bay culls
that could have paid the urgent rent.
    They stand like towers from a city
tinted in Morocco red,
    a mystical mandala with
a text to read for souls in flames.
    A row of narrow townhouses
lining the banks of a Dutch canal.
    Beside them stacks of common fiction,
whose words would not improve on silence.
    Here a history of life the sea
surrendered smells like tidal pools,
    its pages soft and curled in waves.
In some we think a firewall
    divides the character and author;
in some the writer is transformed.
    A few of even those we love
were books that someone closely read
    before they called authorities,
reporting on their hunted neighbors
    for crimes against conformity.

Other volumes, spare and slim,
    help to lip-read what my heart
is saying. Everyone it seems
    knows the standard temperature
at which the printed paper burns.
    But what about the low degree
that makes such standard pages freeze?
    For there are books I have not sold
or tossed that press me down to death.
    They stand and watch me from the shelf.
In those you gave as gifts a hundred
    paper cuts await my blood.

About the Author: Royal Rhodes, who was trained in the Classics, is a retired educator who taught classes in global religions and Death & Dying for almost forty years. His poems have appeared in: Ekstasis Poetry, Snakeskin Poetry, The Montreal Review, The Cafe Review, and other places. His poetry/art collaborations have been published with The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

Image Credit: John Frederick Peto “Still Life with Books, Inkpot, and Candlestick” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.

Cheryl A. Rice: “Crow Will Never Carry A Star Across the Sky”

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Crow Will Never Carry A Star Across the Sky
                            -for MJ

“It’s not my job to carry a
self-sufficient body from dawn to dawn.
I’ve got enough on my mind,
what with gathering foodstuffs to tide me over,
making a nest sturdy enough to withstand
kith and kin, raw eggs, new babies.
Stars live lives beyond all that,
provide the only possible light 
in that seamless backdrop.

It’s not a matter of choice, no choice about it at all.
Check with Blue Jay, busy bullying inbred Sparrows,
or Cardinal, flitting like a match head from bush to bush,
playing the family man so well you can almost see a
station wagon full of chicks behind him.
Goldfinch, Red-Headed Stranger,
elusive Bluebird of Happiness—
maybe one of them has time
to cart a star around there like some aged queen.

I’ve got my own agenda,
make my own rounds without help
from a creature subject to laws of gravity.
Leave me be. I’ve got a Douglass fir to investigate.
Something is shining on that uppermost branch that calls to me,
seems to be spelling my name in semaphoric signs.”

About the Author: Twice a Best of the Net nominee, Cheryl A. Rice’s books include Dressing for the Unbearable (Flying Monkey Press), Until the Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), and Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press). Her monthly column, The Flying Monkey, can be found at https://hvwg.org/, while her occasional blog, Flying Monkey Productions, is at http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com. Rice can be reached at dorothyy62@yahoo.com.

Image Credit: Kazimierz Stabrowski “Crows- Council of Seniors” (1923) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee

Sterling Warner: “Annas Bay Anglers”

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Annas Bay Anglers

Oyster beds rise
from tidal pools
like spiritual mounds
nurturing creation
creating calcium shell reefs
flashing occasional nacre—
mother of pearl prosperity—
distracting fishermen with its
iridescence before recasting
lines opening their third eye
and crown chakras,
activating,
balancing,
energizing
a dreamscape where meditation
of purpose guides each rainy day
angler’s quest for silver perch,
steelhead,
sturgeon,
& salmon.

About the Author: An award-winning author, poet, and emeritus English Professor, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared many literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Anti-Heroin Chic, The Galway Review, Lothlórien Poetry Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner’s poetry/fiction include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022, Halcyon Days: Collected Fibonacci, Abraxas: Poems (2024), and Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Presently, Warner writes, hosts/participates in “virtual” poetry readings, turns wood, and enjoys boating and fishing in Washington.

Image Credit: Public domain image originally published in The Naturalist’s Miscellany, or Coloured Figures of Natural Objects. London: printed for Nodder & Co.,1789-1813. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Ken Hines: “The Recluse of Glendalough”

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The Recluse of Glendalough

At the mouth of the cliffside cave,
foot braced on a crag,
St. Kevin hauls up the rope,
arm over serpentine veined arm,
five fathoms of it dangling a leather bundle
that swings above the lake
like a censer. Drawn to the cave’s emptiness,
he’d turned his back on the abbey’s monks.
Yet they’d pulled the curragh’s oars across the deep
to his hand-hewn lair—
wise men bearing weekly gifts.
Cheese, brown bread, salt fish.

Why would he need paltry
routine, his soul now bared
to the divine?
Cave-coffin his sanctuary.
Lake fog his incense.

If anything is holy, everything is.

About the Author: A 2021 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Ken Hines has written poems that appear in AIOTB, Vita Poetica, Ekphrastic Review, Psaltery & Lyre and other magazines. His poem “Driving Test” won the Third Wednesday Journal Annual Poetry Prize. All this scribbling takes place in Richmond, Virginia.

Image Credit: Denzillacey “The Gateway to the monastic city of Glendalough” (2021) CC BY-SA 4.0. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Jason Baldinger: “the last vestige of tiki”

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the last vestige of tiki

camped on a helipad 
after small town carnivore lights
I could spend my night at rural king
or listening to I-70 lights roar
across this nowhere june tundra
instead I crawl into a corona

carla limes them salts bottleneck
professional bartender gauntlet
she's been at this for centuries
I count the hayseeds
think about nicotine
time stamped into the grass skirts
that may be the last vestige of tiki
left in this motel lounge

she left this town for philly
as soon as she grew wings
bounced around holiday inns
with private dancer as soundtrack
acquired all the merit badges
service time affords
she's been rubies and diamonds 
she's been gold club

but the city will wear on a heart 
the service industry takes what it will
so she left it and a no good man
to come back home
bought in on unincorporated land 
dark skies and nowhere
far enough from the ghost of her memories

she keeps company
with a man from another small town
somewhere dusty like oklahoma 
where they only drink
tomato juice and budwiser
sometimes both if the devil
found his way for a visit recently

tonight it's everyone's birthday
off kilter and out of key
if it were friday or saturday
a band of shitkickers
might stir it up
nothing personal just frustration

kentucky comes next
dipsy doodle foothills
dots of towns wade forgotten
more inventories of years ravaged
years of appalachia left for dead

I cash out after I hit my limit
tip amounts to the check
carla and I wish each other luck

back to the helipad
roar of interstate in my hair
I’ll sleep deeply tonight
wrapped in the red of wildflower smoke

About the Author: Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA. He is the co-editor of Trailer Park Quarterly and co-runs The Odd-Month Reading Series. He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), American Aorta (OAC Books) and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, was just released. He has two ekphrastic collaborations (with poets Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him read from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster.

Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “A rather sublime-looking tiki head stands outside the gift shop of the old Ranchero Motel in the tiny settlement of Anteres, Arizona, in Mohave County along U.S. Highway 66” (2018)

Leslie M. Rupracht: “Winter Solstice 2023”

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Winter Solstice 2023

           In Memory of Mike James

on this shortest day of the year 
my grief is long

just four days since you transitioned 
from this world to realm of sweet angels 
& revered poets passed 

now more than ever

i picture you as marlena in pink

no longer needing to maintain

the burly john wayne façade

to appease employer & bigots alike 

you were my brother-sister-confidante

you’d say there’s your TMI for the day 
i’d insist there’s no such thing

& treasure your confidence

it was a privilege being your ally

a pleasure your chosen family 

there’s a seat for you now at the table 
of your cherished ghosts—
marlene dietrich

robert lowell

james dickey

ezra pound

hemingway

warhol

haring

rocky
brando

& wayne
as great as they were

your legacy is secure 

most magnificent

is the hopeful certainty you’re with 
your dearest grandmother again— 
first ally 
first cheerleader

first force for good 
the first to really see you for you

About the Author: Leslie M. Rupracht has poems in Asheville Poetry Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Aeolian Harp, Chiron Review, K’in, The Ekphrastic Review, Gargoyle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Kakalak, a chapbook, Splintered Memories (Main Street Rag), and elsewhere. She completed her first full-length poetry manuscript in 2023 and hopes to find it a good home. An editor, poet, writer, visual artist, and rescued pit bull mama, Leslie is co-founder and host of the monthly reading series, Waterbean Poetry Night at the Mic, in Huntersville, North Carolina.

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Solstice Rose” (2024)

Jason Visconti: “After The Drought”

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After The Drought

The clouds just join till rain’s a melody,
I hear the words pitched in every drop,
something’s in the song the lyricist should steal,
the vocals are tense as strings of harps,
the flood just a concert unconcealed.

About the Author: Jason Visconti has attended both group and private poetry workshops. His work has appeared in various journals, including “Blazevox”, “Valley Voices”, and “The American Journal of Poetry”. He especially enjoys the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Billy Collins.

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Rain Clouds at Night” (2021)