Magazine
“Books” By Royal Rhodes
“After The Drought” By Jason Visconti
“Annas Bay Anglers” By Sterling Warner
“The Recluse of Glendalough” By Ken Hines
“Crow Will Never Carry A Star Across the Sky” By Cheryl A. Rice
“Winter Solstice 2023” By Leslie M. Rupracht
“Goodnight, Saint Peregrine” By Rebecca Schumejda
“April Fools’ Day – In All Good Fun” By Geraldine Cannon
“the last vestige of tiki” By Jason Baldinger
“Waking up in India to the News that Mike is Dead” By Agnes Vojta
“Invisible Ink” By M.J. Arcangelini
“Fishing Both Sides of the River” By Cheryl A. Rice
“Floods and Fires” By James Croal Jackson
“On a Cold Afternoon at the Sit-N-Bull” By John Dorsey
“Running for the Bus in a Rainstorm” By Diana Rosen
“In Memory Of” By Howie Good
“the aforementioned skyline” By Jason Baldinger
“i hear it through the static,” By John Compton
“The Calm Before” By Jason Ryberg
“Taking My Students To See The Mayans And Aztecs But They Talk Me Into Staring At A Bunch Of Dead Things” By Kellie Diodato
“Ruminations of an Airplane Passenger Before the Flight Turned Around & Returned to its Departure Airport” By G.M.H. Thompson
“Getting a Haircut from the Only Woman in Monroe County, Mississippi, Who Was Willing to Go to Funeral Homes in the Middle of the Night and Style the Hair of Corpses” By Samuel Prestridge
“Pissant” By S. Stephanie
“How Birdwatching Saved Your Life” By Justin Karcher
“Privacy Setting” By Sarah Carleton
“My Favorite Poet in Town” By Michael Layne Heath
“Dear Eve,” By Jessica Wickens
“Sonnet for Redecorating Plato’s Cave” By Paul Ilechko
“Religion” By Ace Boggess
“In Memoriam” By Howie Good
A Review of
Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment
By Caroline Reddy
In Caroline Reddy’s Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment she emerges from the skull of modern warfare and violence a fully grown Athena, in her “steampunk space suit / underneath the human skin” wielding her weapons of language: “I release my daggers / after years of betrayal / molting into a warrior.” Being of Iranian and Ghanaian heritage, she brings the power and songs of her elders as a way to unify the world’s discord: “My ancestors / who protected mountains, / climb on opposite / sides of the world / to bring me harmony.” Through her poignant and powerful verse, Reddy triumphs in her goal to preserve the holiness: “After our last dokusan / when I told you about / how music had been murdered / you requested / that I keep the legacy / of the world alive.”
She has been through terror herself, in Tehran: “Hold still child / to the fuzzy blanket / until the siren stops” and she knows the fear of the children in current conflicts, Ukraine, Gaza, and how to somehow heal and transmute these atrocities into song of spirit: “We have learned that harsh moments / can be alchemized into particles of light / that unfurl from Indra’s net / to help us on our ascension.”
In this way, her book becomes timely and crucial to somehow processing our present grief and anger at the continued killing of innocents on this earth. Reddy, in assuming the role of poetic warrior and magician, allows us to ride the brightness of her robe, the glint of her spear, the clarity of her words. We feel this with her because we have been there: “but i had been beaten / and belittled by so many / that i didn’t believe / in my own myth.” But this is an intimate battle done in the darkest places, and this is what makes it even more transformative once the light is found:
I closed my eyes and let the tears drip
and dreamt of the quartz crystals to pour,
for the light of Earendil appeared
and the planets smiled
as I began to widen:
beyond the shadows
beyond the bitter wind.
She transforms ashes into fire, necrotic tissue into stem cells, violence into compassion and unity. As she states:
Songs rise from the ashes as Qoqnoos burns away debris of thistles and last bits of sterile soil from the chambers of my heart. The spring Equinox brings Nowruz as I tumble through tombs and burst from beneath the snow like a lustrous tulip. In this collection, Reddy takes in all of the rancor and cruelty she has faced, and others continue to suffer, and reanimates them as feathered things which guide us also to emerge from this torment as changed beings. She becomes a mother of birds, of hope: “I dream of a womb / where the ashes of a wondered bird / do not spoil.” With much of the poetry written being one of victimhood and being caged within a sadness or a trauma, Reddy’s work elevates to a level of one who has walked the desert for forty days and forty nights and who has come back with these ethereal and thunderous truths, this glowing body and this glowing sword. This is a wonderous book. Reddy invites us to all to once again believe our own myths.
About the Author: Scott Ferry helps our veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His book Sapphires on the Graves is coming out from Glass Lyre Press in late 2024.
Funereal Geometry: The Evangelical Congregation Concludes the Funeral by Singing “In Christ, There is No East or West / No North or South,” while Outside the Church and Midway Up, a Steeplejack Tests to See the Steeple’s True
If a plumbline’s run from Heaven’s door bell
to the red baize on Satan’s pool table;
and if such a line bisects their steeple;
and if the steeple’s perpendicular—
perpendicular, foursquare, ever true--
to the church’s temporal foundation,
the workman’s spirit level always rules
theology and recalibration.
Lacking such, the skewed will keep on skewing,
will mime secular drift–anathema
to the faith and the faithful, those who cleave
to the steeple's cleft, crowd a receding
circumference, and create a holy
right angle to the vertical axis.
That’s why the steeplejack’s climbed the steeple
even as the funeral rumbles, smacks
around his calibrations. He’s allowed
no room for error in the elders’ view:
the journeyman’s warrant is the last word
in church doctrine. The steeple must be true,
must aim straight up. The soul shoots for a pole
implied by the steeple. Off-plumb slivers
of a bubble, who knows where the launched soul
might end up. Heaven's the point of a pin.
About the Author: Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, and The Southern Humanities Review.
He is a post-aspirational man whose first book A Dog’s Job of Work is seeking publication. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. His children concede that he is, generally, an adequate father.
Image Credit: John Vachon “Zell, South Dakota. Church buildings” (1942) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
funeral arrangements in the crawlspace
the floor peels
to reveal the plots
where a son’s memories
were buried
& the son
months later
laid himself
to rest.
//
in the dark room
i hear sobbing.
from the corner
of my eye
a mother
on hands & knees
clawing the boards,
trying to dig open
the wood,
trying to dig open
her son.
About the Author: john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)
Image Credit: “Interior view, looking up toward project west at the heavy timber joists and center beam supporting the wood water tank” Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Wardenclyffe
The present is theirs. The future, for which I really worked, is mine.
-Nicola Tesla
Is what I imagined tangible—
this motor, powered by fireflies,
streamer arc threads of phosphorescent light
discharging from the center coil.
I go from idea to reality,
a star among the stars.
I do not think there is any thrill
like the inventor seeing a creation come to success,
the exhilarating sense of the future.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
If my current can travel distances,
my work is immortal—
resurrecting my vision, broadcasting to Mars.
Thought is electrical energy.
Why can’t we photograph it?
The primary circuits of us all,
high-speed alternators—
many colors, myriad frequencies.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
My tower dream ran out of funds—
demolished to scrap,
the property sold to the highest bidder.
I live on credit at the Waldorf,
along with spark-excited ghosts.
My only friends are pigeons in Bryant Park—
My favorite is a female.
As long as she lives,
There is light in my life.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
About the Author: Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).
Image Credit: “Tesla sits with his “magnifying transmitter” in Colorado Springs in 1899″ Image courtesy of Wikipedia. CC BY 4.0
What We’re Here for
for bart solarczyk & bob phillips
your whole generation
seemed to know
how to swat away a compliment
kind words tossed
into a river
full of mud & rust
born out of houses
with tin roofs & tar paper hearts
by men & women
who knew the weight
of factory gloves
after so many years
their fingers piercing
the very edges of time
even poems are just about
doing the job
like pushing a mop
or wiping sweat
away from your heart
after the loss of a friend or a spouse or your sanity
knowing that’s just what time does
knowing you just have to keep putting the work in
because that’s what we’re here for.
About the Author: John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Historic house with tin roof in Eutaw, Alabama” (2010) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
The Desert
arid scrubland where life flees the sun
water washes over color-stained rocks
but provides little relief or support
people trudge under sunhats,
quietly swiping away their sweat
but the lizards thrive and snakes
coil in drowsy satisfaction
a little is enough they seem to say
today is just another day
the flat horizon shimmers in waves
of light and dry heat
trucks roar along the interstate
loaded with boxes and crate,
the concerns of another world,
while the scorpions work
with the basics, ready
to kill and eat as darkness
falls and life slithers forward—
always forward, not to be denied
About the Author: Chuck Kramer’s poetry and fiction have appeared online and in print, most recently Lothlorien, The Raven’s Perch and The Good Men Project. He has also been a finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Awards in 2017 and 2023. Memoir in Chicago Quarterly Review (a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2023), Sobotka, Evening Street Review. Journalism in Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Reader, Windy City Times and Gay Chicago Magazine.
Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Desert Exit” (2024)
As It Ought To Be 
