Magazine
Ruth Bavetta: “My Father’s Shirts”
Jacob Butlett: “Feeding Time at the Zoo”
John Compton: “the musical of the bell jar”
A.M. Hayden: “Ghost Leg”
Joshua Lillie: “What Becomes A Tumbleweed”
Joseph Mills: “Retinue”
J.R. Solonche: “The Ceiling”
Alicia Wright: “She doesn’t wish me dead”
Rose Mary Boehm: “Boil them”
Rebecca Clifford: “Climatic Divinations”
Sam Hendrian: “Magazine Ads”
Paul Ilechko: “A Clock Is Ticking”
Tricia Knoll: “Next Time You Interview a Unicorn Prepare Better Questions”
H.K.G. Lowery: “Villa Diodati”
Samuel Prestridge: “Why I’ve Not Cut Down The Yes Ma’am Bush”
Tamarah Rockwood: “Persephone’s first day out”
Jason Ryberg: “No Great Hurry”
Matthew Ussia: “Home Improvement Advice for Anyone Owning a House More Than One Hundred Years Old”
The Other Genesis What do we see outside except a canopy of ebony wings, garlands of feathery smoke moving on blackened water? Against the sketchy light it looks like a cancer patient showing us their fifth x-ray. The troubled lungs, highlighted: a cage of full-grown crows in a space too small for them and anxious for routes to escape, fanning their jittery wings against imprisoning walls. Something screamed in fear, locked inside us, watching. Resistance is useless, absurd, trapped in something we are. We saw their work when free: the substantial killing along the state route. They strutted around the roadkill, plucking at bits of the dying creatures, supple as the playful light. When will it end? we ask. And why did it ever begin? We are the understanding they lack. So we took them deep inside us.
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: Image originally from British Ornithology: Norwich: Bacon,1815-22. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Crabbing at Nehalem Bay: a virelai After “Douce Dame Jolie” by Guillaume de Machaut My will is that your claw should grab This cat food, that your mind should stab Its doubts and urge you, like its lab Rat, into trying something new. The tide is closing out my tab… I swab The weather’s face and ocean’s too. I fill my boat with air and flab To nab Some pride and dinner for my boo. I’m frightened not when shorelines blab; I see the semi-love Les Schwab Half-buried under sand. My cab Is fate; we’re not just driving through! My will is that your claw should grab This cat food, that your mind should stab Its doubts and urge you, like its lab Rat, into trying something new. The seagulls here all do the dab. Ahab I’m not, but niveous visions do Call me away from any slab A schlub Could stand on; courage isn’t blue. The clam beds sleep beneath Queen Mab Despite my screams when every ab I catch is slightly rounded. Drab My engine’s soul and instinct’s clue. My will is that your claw should grab This cat food, that your mind should stab Its doubts and urge you, like its lab Rat, into trying something new. Off Hwy 101 facts jab Prefab Experiences; they don’t come true Because the gift of every crab Is gab: They rival Athens in a coup! But south of Wheeler, night’s hijab Is not on yet. My buoys scab The waters so that Dr. Krabbe, If he was here, would say, “Achoo!” My will is that your claw should grab This cat food, that your mind should stab Its doubts and urge you, like its lab Rat, into trying something new.
About the Author: Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and US Air Force veteran. He’s published a full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe” (White Violet Press), along with two chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing) and “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision).
Image Credit: Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der Deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition auf dem Dampfer “Valdivia” 1898-1899. bd.6. Atlas Jena,G. Fischer,1902-40. Public domain image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
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
Cat Tequila Gathered ‘round a glass of milk, the only question now: who will eat the mouse tail in the bottom? Mess themselves up real good? The tail sucks up all the milk, you see!
About the Author: Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine The New York Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
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Image Credit: Henry Pointer “The Old Bachelor” (1865) Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.
Do you think the lobsters in the tanks at Red Lobster are really red? Or are they brackish and imperfect with the blue rubber bands around their claws? Do you think the lobsters know they could live half a century if given the chance? Do you think the lobsters know we have to believe they don’t feel pain? We sometimes believe that about our own species too. Do you think the lobsters know?
About the Author: Geneva Webber is a sophomore Creative and Professional Writing major and is minoring in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She is a member of the Writing Club, is Vice President of P.A.W.S. (Pro-activism With Service) and her work has been previously published in The Insider. She has lived in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and small-town Michigan, and derives much of her writing from small, intimate, personal experiences.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The American lobster Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1895.
Snake I used to be afraid in other ways. When one fear comes another goes away, I should count myself lucky in that way. My fear of apes at night just fell away when I saw a snake put a rat away. Those fanged apes were dream creatures anyway. The snake coiled and crushing. Death underway. Those sounds. The hissing. A shriek. They outweigh sleep's imagined deaths. They won't fade away at dawn. Experience smooths night's highway. Like rockets, fears race down the straight-away. Then they take my head for their hideaway. I used to be afraid in other ways. But then I saw the black snake's weave and sway.
About the Author: Paul Jones poems have recently appeared in Hudson Review, Grand Little Things, Tar River Poetry, and not so long ago here in As It Ought To Be. His book, Something Wonderful, came from RedHawk Publications in 2021. In 2019, a manuscript of his poems crashed into the lunar surface carried in Israel’s Beresheet Lander. In 2021, he was inducted into the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame.
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Image Credit: Image originally published in Descriptiones et icones amphibiorum. Monachii, Stuttgartiae et Tubingae, Sumtibus J.G. Cottae1833. Public domain image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
A Lightness of Feathers Who among us hasn't broken a collarbone falling out of a tree after we climbed into a bird's nest and pretended to be an egg? The ghost of omelets gone wrong. Something with feathers condemned to a passing glance. A side table. Somewhere dust calls home. I’ll rebuild my life with doilies and photos of surgeries I’d like to have. Did I mention so-and-so died after a lifetime of regret and forced choices? Never forget your name is on someone’s Do Not Love Again list. No matter how you measure it, you’ll never have what you’ve lost again. Another name for insouciance. At least you’re not the kind of bird that kicks the other eggs out of the nest when you settle in. It’s the small victories keep us going and coming. That’s how they get you. I don’t even know what kind of tree it was.
About the Author: Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.
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Image Credit: Public domain image originally published in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, London : Academic Press. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Guidelines for House Gecko Leave pearl eggs in dark spots— behind sockets or bookshelves. Crawl the walls on sticky toes, but if you see people, scuttle to a crack and hide. Squeak for help. Chirp for sex. Eat bugs and multiply. Let the little ones dash across carpets but only at night. You’ll last for years here, hovering in the laundry room, waiting for roaches but even if a fleshy hand catches you and drops you in the grass, don’t panic. Remember, your name is House. You know where all the secret passages are.
About the Author: Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, The Wild Word, Valparaiso, As It Ought to Be, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
Image Credit: Illustration originally from Histoire naturelle de Lacépède. Paris: Furne, Jouvet et cie. Public domain image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
As It Ought To Be 