Magazine
Nadia Arioli: “Sam Insists Only Oak”
Jon Bennet: “Petty Dreams”
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozábal: “Thoughts”
Sarah Carleton: “No, I would not like to ride”
Bart Edelman: “What Happens Here”
Marc Janssen: “Dog Days”
Linda Lerner: “Twenty-Four Hour Non-Stop News”
Anita Lerek: “Song for Blood Vibrato”
Jim Murdoch: “The Great Ledger in the Sky”
Timothy Tarkelly: “Long Night”
Robin Wright: “Nesting”
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)
Tears
Skin once taut over muscle and bone
grows soft and softer still, as age moves on
and may bring sadness unknown before,
or a kind of thrill to mark the passage
on a map of being in this place, this age.
Adventures are remembered in crinkling folds.
Sitting or standing will require slower motion.
No matter the pain that is now no small matter.
An old drum at rest for a while needs the essential oil
of caring hands, each touch and each beat deepening
into warm inviting sounds, smelling of vanilla rain.
Pitter patter, falling softly. Softly enfolded in loved arms.
Hush and listen, safe and dear one, ever close to heart,
where ear is at the center, just as art is in the earth,
and ripples continue beyond the edge of the pond.
About the Author: Geraldine Cannon is a poet, scholar, and editor, also working as a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, under her married name–Becker. She has been published in various journals and anthologies. She published Glad Wilderness (Plain View Press, 2008).. She has been helping others publish, and had stopped sending her own material out, but she was encouraged to do so again, and most recently has a new poem in the Winter issue, Gate of Dawn (Monroe House Press, 2024).
Image Credit: Jan Ciągliński “Rain – impressions from the train” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel
By Richard Vargas:
a book review
By J.T. Whitehead
…
I want to hit on about three things, all of which intersect, in praising Richard Vargas’s collection, “leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel.” I want to talk a little bit about what it means to do a ‘political poem,’ in the loosest sense that this means. Meaning: I want to talk about writing from direct experience, as opposed to writing from theory. This brings up Vargas’s unique sense of empathy. And last, I want to talk about style just a little bit, to remind us all that clarity and clean writing is not an abandonment of it. All these things explain why I like Richard Vargas’s poetry.
In an anthology of essays titled “Poetry and Politics,” edited by Richard Jones, I want to say I recall the poet Denise Levertov making a succinct point about some of what we call “political poetry.” She alluded to Bertolt Brecht’s version of the political poem as something akin to “marching orders.” I remembered this and wrote it down and it has stuck with me, but I don’t have the patience to re-read her essay right now. So if she did not characterize some political poetry, like Brecht’s, as something like “marching orders,” then let me do so now, and continue to credit her with the idea, just in case.
Don’t get me wrong. A theoretician or an academic poet who cares about humanity, without having experienced the bad jobs or prison experience he or she writes about, is still on the human and not the dehumanizing side of things. Bertolt Brecht was on the side of humanity. But when poets write about such things from some place other than their own experience, they must invariably do so in the third person, or do so in an abstract or at least imagined way. We, as readers, tend not to relate as much to such work. But Vargas only writes about what he has experienced himself, without assuming to understand worse. He wonders about it, and more on that later, but he never presumes.
Continue reading “A Review of leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel By Richard Vargas”
Havok
When the latest version of Dogs of War
dropped, adolescents of all ages kept vigil.
Children played like adults. Adults played
like children. True for all good fun, killing
felt almost real. In this virtual world
(“virtual” comes from the Latin for “manly”),
the human body springs alive with detail,
down to platelets and red and white blood cells.
In slow motion, you watch the discharged round
spin and spin and spin until you see the impact,
then hear the sound. The slow motion kill
effects are insane, down to shattering bone.
How could verisimilitude this true
not make anyone fall in love with war?
About the Author: Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. He is a fiction reader for The Maine Review.
Image Credit: Rik Wouters “Nightmare – War” (1914) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
And Then There was Death
The last time I spoke to my husband was a Saturday night before bed.
We hugged and gave each other a smooch on the lips.
My husband put his hands on my shoulders and said,
“Now tomorrow morning we will go to Trower’s for sure!”
Several Sundays were missed because of bad weather.
He drove to Trower’s, a twenty-minute drive, because his cigarette brand was not sold in any of our local stores.
We used to go to Trower’s for breakfast, but that was before my husband became more depressed and weaker due to cancer, and vascular disease.
He began to withdraw from society, except for Trower’s.
He had given up his life-long hobbies making reproductions of Kentucky and Pennsylvania muzzle loaders and playing the banjo. He no longer practiced Buddhism.
On several occasions he said he wanted to die but didn’t want me left “flapping in the wind.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I was always silent, just holding his hand.
If I would have assured him I would be okay,
would that be like giving him permission to kill himself?
If I said I wouldn’t be okay, that would put an extra burden on him.
What had we been through in the last two or more years because of his illnesses?
Endless doctor appointments, Cat-scans, bloodwork, X-rays, radiation treatment, stent surgery.
Bad reactions to several antidepressants.
Falling, requiring a hospital stay which revealed nothing.
Physical therapy to gain strength.
He didn’t become strong.
He became weaker, falling several more times.
On one occasion, he fell against the bedroom door, and I could barely get the door open
to lift him onto the bed.
I wouldn’t allow him to smoke in the house, only in his room.
I had uncontrolled asthma.
He didn’t resent this decision except on very cold winter days when his open ventilating window made the room unbearable.
But at least he smoked his half a cigarette very quickly: a half a cigarette every hour.
We had many disagreements about his smoking,
but since he had been smoking for more than 60 years,
the thought of him quitting was out of the question for him.
“The damage is done, I’m 80 so how many years do I have left anyway? I have to have one pleasure.”
I would rant and rave about the insanity of lethal corporations and government regulations that outlawed heroin and weed, but not cigarettes. My only coping mechanism.
“Well, it’s your choice to smoke, but at least I don’t have to enable your addiction by going with you to Trower’s.”
I eventually went with him, but I didn’t drive,
rationalizing that at least I wasn’t a total enabler.
On that last evening I ever saw my husband alive, I resigned myself to drive him in the morning to get his cigarettes rather than having him die in a car crash.
His decreased depth perception and slowed reflex problems didn’t bode well for a successful trip.
“Goodnight, sweetheart.” “Me, too.”
When he wasn’t out of bed by 6:30 am, I knocked on his door.
Since there was no reassuring answer that he was awake, I opened the door.
His head was sticking out of the covers.
I touched his cold head. I moved his head. There was no response.
I kissed him on the forehead and said, “I’ll always love you.”
I walked out to the living room to call 911.
“This is it!” I said to myself, as I ambivalently welcomed death into my house.
About the Author: Connie Woodring is a 79-year-old retired psychotherapist who has been getting back to her true love of writing after 45 years in her real job. She has had many poems published in over 40 journals including one nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. She has had ten excerpts from her novel Visiting Hours, published in various journals. She has had five excerpts from her non-fiction book, What Power? Which People? Reflections on Power Abuse and Empowerment, published in various journals. Her memoir was published in White Wall Review.
Image Credit: Jean Pierre François Lamorinière “Landscape with Herons at Sunset” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 
