Night Swimming
After working another shift
in the oppressive Jersey heat
taking food orders from the privileged
and counting tips so I can make
my rent that just went up again
any ghost from Roman literature
would definitely point out that
I haven’t been very carpe diem
as of lately
so I make my way
to North End beach
surrounded by teenagers making out
past their curfews in the sand
and stoners hot-boxing
beneath overturned lifeguard boats
I take off my work clothes
while this drunken couple
on the shoreline beside me
continue their post-bar conversation
about the fate of the world
the fate of us all, fire and ice,
as if they were knocking back
a few earlier with Robert Frost
they try to ask me what I think
but I’m already diving into the surf
and by the time I resurface they leave
and all I’m left with is just this darkness
as I float on the calmness of the water
I don't know what’ll happen I think to myself
but the stars sure do look pretty tonight.
About the Author: Cord Moreski is a poet from the Jersey Shore. Moreski is the author of Confined Spaces (Two Key Customs, 2022), The News Around Town (Maverick Duck Press, 2020), and Shaking Hands with Time (Indigent Press, 2018). When he is not writing, Cord waits tables for a living and teaches middle school children that poetry is awesome. His next chapbook Apartment Poems will be released by Between Shadows Press in late 2022. You can follow Cord here: www.cordmoreski.com
Image Credit:Léon Spilliaert “Beachview at Night” (1905) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
How to Own Nothing
When you gave me a drawer at your place to keep my things
I told you I don’t keep anything except my promises,
I told you the only thing I’ve ever truly owned is my heavy heart
But still you gave me this one drawer to come home to
I searched the ghost town of my personal possessions
And exhumed the things I was too afraid to admit I loved
The only photo of my mother pregnant with me
An old dictionary annotated with English to Spanish translations
My Saint Lazarus pendant
The first letter you ever wrote me
I placed them in the drawer and I was home
About the Author: Rocío Iglesias is a queer Cuban-American poet. Her work has appeared in various print and electronic publications and can most recently be found in Cuento Magazine and the Piker Press. She lives, breathes, and works in Minneapolis, MN.
Image Credit: Russell Lee “Dresser in farmhouse. Williams County, North Dakota” (1937) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Riding with Monk
Epistrophy, apostrophe,
brush these blues off of me.
Lift me off this loneliest of roads,
beyond these bare trees.
Even in their beauty,
these bones of winter
hold no answers,
only questions.
On this road of introspection,
you tease me with those keys.
I don’t blame you, but
I’ve had all the blues I can abide.
I’m not in the mood.
Give it to me straight.
I’m tired of chasing dreams.
Lend me yours.
It doesn’t have to be easy,
but these streets would look
a whole lot better with
blue skies and just a little green.
About the Author: Ken Gierke is retired and has lived in Missouri since 2012, when he moved from Western New York, where the Niagara River fostered a love for nature. He writes primarily in free verse and haiku, often inspired by hiking and kayaking. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming both in print and online in such places as Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, Silver Birch Press, Trailer Park Quarterly, The Gasconade Review, and River Dog Zine. Glass Awash, published by Spartan Press, is his first collection of poetry. His website: https://rivrvlogr.com/
Image Credit: “Nachtconcert van Thelonious Monk in het Concertgebouw Datum” (1961) Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia, CC0
Two Kinds
It was dusk
on a two-lane road
in deep East Texas
and we had not passed
a word for miles
when she said
there are two kinds
of people in the world.
Years later, the turtles
in my neighborhood
know nothing of
my friend’s philosophy.
Or how simply
some things boil down.
The red-eared slider at my feet,
flipped over and still but still here,
knew seasons.
She knew navigation
and the grass best for nesting.
Tenacity.
Now, spun senseless
to where the street met the curb,
she lay bloody, mud-baked legs
splayed flat and a gut-deep wound
cracked clean down her belly.
Turtles have inched their way
across hundreds of millions of years,
ducking one mass extinction
after another protected by nothing more
than the home on their back.
Today, the turkey vultures
working a squirrel
three blocks away
will catch wind
of this one at my feet,
an ancient traveler
felled handily enough
by steel on rubber
and the kind who
do not stop.
About the Author: Tina Williams is a former journalism instructor and advertising copywriter living in Austin, TX. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in the New Verse News, Amethyst, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the Concho River Review.
Image Credit: Public domain image originally published in North American herpetology : Philadelphia, J. Dobson;1842. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
you are my
cathedral of air
and hopefulness
in opening things
shades curtains
harnesses reins
buttons zippers morning
sky evening rain
flowers sun
a tube
of paint stiff lashes
bottomless eyes
blank
paper
packs of pens
errant as road trips
unruly as we are
reindeer ready to fly
the other 364 days a year
-for Reverie
About the Author: Paul Koniecki lives in Dallas, Texas. He was once chosen for the John Ashbery Home School Residency. His poems feature in Richard Bailey’s movie “One of the Rough” distributed by AVIFF Cannes. Paul proudly sits on the editorial board of Thimble Literary Magazine. His poems have appeared in Henniker Review, Chiron Review, Gasconade Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Trailer Park Review, Poetry Bay, and many more. Paul is currently finishing his MFA at VCFA.
I first noticed their absence when I put down my writing journal on my nightstand. They were supposed to be there. It was one of those heirlooms that anyone would cherish – which I did. These golden hoops with sapphire gems that my Nicaraguan grandma had kept all her life. “They’re Italian,” she said. Whenever she wanted to denote a worth on some person, place, or thing, she emphasized it was European. Remnants of colonization in a tiny gift box.
My first thought was to blame the other patient. I was at a rehab facility, a mental health one, and my new roommate was, well, unknown to me. She was an older lady with long grey hair, and a bad smoker’s cough. She said she hadn’t slept in five days. I don’t know how that’s possible, but that meant that she was probably awake the night before when I assumed her sleeping and mumbled to myself in my bed. No… it wasn’t her…
I could hear my grandma now, the way she would sigh of “throwing away all that money away” when I lost the pearl necklace or “all those years of taking care of something” when I lost the diamond tennis bracelet. I ought to cherish these things – which I did.
I thought to blame the technician who made the rounds every morning at 6am waking us up for vitals. The earrings could have gleamed in the night, and she could have snatched them. Then I thought to blame the cleaning lady who walked in without knocking and consistently saw me naked as I hurriedly slipped into something after shower time. I cringed; my classism was showing.
I could hear my grandmother now, the way she always blamed “the help” when she lost something. And it was always her misplacement. Why is it that our reflex is to judge others before we look at ourselves?
As I contemplated my moral discipline, a semblance of light illuminated my memory. Had I stored it somewhere before going to take my meds? Had I placed it in a jean pocket or a sweater or a jacket? Maybe I placed it in my denim jacket before I slipped it off at the pool?
I chased to the little mahogany closet to whip out my jacket. I dug my hand into the left pocket now. Oh! It was in the right-hand pocket. I unbuttoned it. Oh! My earrings.
I held them in the palm of my hand and fingered the clasp of the hoop, still sturdy after 50 years in an old vanity drawer. I put them on, inserted the stick in my ear hole and clasped in the gold bar. They were pristine and beautiful. I took them off. I wouldn’t dare wear them again.
For once I wouldn’t lose the Italian heirlooms. I tucked them into a cloth pocket and pulled the strings to enclose them in.
And then I realized how many centuries had come to land on this rapid-fire moment, when I realized I was no better than the ancestors before me – blaming others for my own shortcomings.
About the Author: Karina Castrillo is a freelance writer for Women’s Health Magazine, and a communications specialist at a labor union based in New Jersey. Born and raised in Miami, she speaks Spanglish, and enjoys Cuban pastelitos. You can find her vintage shopping in Brooklyn, at a picket line or a protest, or walking her chihuahua Enzo – who’s tiny but has a big bark.Instagram/Twitter: @Karinainthecity
Mucus Fishing
On hot summer days my granddad
would poke at his eyes with
an uncharacteristically garish
green silk hankie.
Asked what he was up to he’d smile
(his mouth at least, never his eyes),
and say,
“Gathering stale tears, my dear.
Too often we forget or neglect to cry
or hold onto our tears and years on,
well, they congeal and you need to
tease them out,”
or something of that ilk.
Like most old folk my grandfather
talked a lot of rot but he was sweet,
had the soul of a poet and the heart,
we learned (too late),
although it came as no surprise,
of a terminally-sad man.
My mother washed the handkerchief.
I was so mad at her.
About the Author: Jim grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. In fact his first poem was in butchered Scots. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevances—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in secondary school the teacher read Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ and he felt as if the proverbial scales had fallen from his eyes. How could something so… so unpoetic as far as he could tell be poetry? He’s been trying to answer that question for the past fifty years.
From This Height, Six Days before 9/11
The plane inches toward take-off.
I glance at family members,
waving us on to our destination,
Lawton, Oklahoma,
our son’s graduation
from basic training.
From the air, the ground
looks like Seurat painted it,
blue swimming pools,
green and brown fields,
more like quilt squares
than dots, nature’s ballroom,
enjoyment for the locals.
Seurat used conte crayons
on rough paper for sketches.
Our son’s diploma
will be on smooth paper,
cream with dark type,
his name large in the middle,
no conte crayons,
the worst roughness
lies ahead.
About the Author: Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in As it Ought to Be, Loch Raven Review, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, Rat’s Ass Review, Bulb Culture Collective, Bindweed, One Art, Young Ravens Literary Review, Sanctuary, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in October of 2020.
Image Credit:Georges Seurat “Poplars” (1883-1884) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
TIME TRAVEL
On Saturday mornings when watching
“Land of the Lost,” I wished Sleestak,
the lizard-men with ebony globular eyes,
would decide to chase me. Then human
Will would save me. In my daydreams,
the young man, top shirt buttons always
undone, always did. So, Will and I would
be best friends in that time of dinosaurs
where his family was trapped, even though
I was just a boy. In the show credits, I saw
the actor’s name was Wesley, just Wesley.
On Saturday nights a few years later when
watching “Doctor Who” on the PBS station,
I’d note how Adric was cool with his alien
tunic oh so bright. Because we were both
teenage boys who relished mathematics
(he hailed from the planet Alzarius while
I came from the world of rural America),
we could talk and talk about my problems
from my earthbound classes as we waited
to see where the space-and-time-traveling
Doctor and his companions wound up next
in that ship masquerading as a police box.
Adric had no surname. He was just Adric.
It’s a Saturday past midnight in a new century.
A geeky shirtless suitor at the gay bar tells me
those actors whom I’d admired had grown up,
come out. I was a small-town boy in the 1970s,
introverted teen in the ’80s, so gays were even
more fictional to me than Adric or Will. Queer
was the one-word name I hid, unable to predict
its expansive future. Time travel stays elusive
except in television series, movies, short stories,
novels, comics, scientists’ heads, and my poems.
About the Author: Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta print newspaper digital editor whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Plainsongs, Atlanta Review, Fathom, and elsewhere.
Image Credit: Pawel Kadysz (untitled image) Public Domain image courtesy of Wikimedia. Creative Commons CC0
when pigs fly
maybe pigs will fly
take a running start down st nicolas
into the wind like early sons of aviation
before crashing into the monongahela
maybe they'll launch from wadell avenue
a doppler squeal lost in a mothball sky
in this valley of work anything is possible
even the great american dream
stan musial could flat out hit
from the back of the batters box
bat sweeping across the plate
ball bouncing off left field wall
he hustles into second
he worked off seasons
a freight checker at us steel
his wife set up housekeeping
a few blocks from where he was born
maybe the world was smaller then
they were off to st louis
when the inversion started
smog veils, this valley nightmare
gossamer sunsets
halloween gas masks
a weight that sits
suffocating on your chest
it was no surprise
people started to die
it was no surprise doom
settled this city in smog
musial collected his parents
sent them to enjoy their dotage
somewhere in suburban missouri
he didn't come back
not to sit on a jeep on thanksgiving
as parades death marched
from the sons of italy
past the rooming houses
down hills that lead
down river to forbes field
cardinals in traveling grays
musial sends bob friend’s fastball
on a right field richochet
clemente fields it cleanly
fires it home
musial at second
tips his hat as pigs fly by
the valley of work gasps for breath
the rich will always get richer
the air may recover or kill more slowly
really, it's more lottery than dream
About the Author: Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA. He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, as well as two ekphrastic collaborations (with Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) are forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster. His etsy shop can be found under the tag la belle riviere.
Image Credit: Detroit Publishing Co “The Bleachers, Forbes Field, Pittsburgh, Pa.” Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 
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