each click, on & off, each step further gone, closer come: “we can be beautiful again” quavers through empty space, the white noise, the shapeless lips curling around each word. we can be beautiful again—the noun, the adjective: a second endeavor.
About the Author: john compton is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. the latest book: the castration of a minor god (Ghost City Press; december 2022) and: blacked out borderland from an exponential crisis (Ethel Zine & Micro Press; aug 2023).
Image Credit: Mysid “An analog TV showing noise, on a channel with no transmission” Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia.
It’s been another long and perilous week but we’ve finally come around to the relative calm of another Sunday afternoon.
And the sun has just now slipped away behind a slate-grey bank of clouds and the wind is still rolling around in its dream-soaked sleep over in the vacant, weed-clotted lot across the street.
But the traffic ‘round town churns and lurches and then suddenly stalls, lurches and stalls, lurches and stalls all with the passive-aggressive demeanor of massive schools of tropical fish.
And so far, it’s been another one of those barren, bombed-out type of Sundays wherein nothing really happens and the weather and the time fight a cold civil war of attrition for a mere toehold on the day, one of those days when you just can’t seem to get your bearings or screw your head on straight or locate your proper place in a world full of places where you don’t want to be, people you don’t want to meet and useless things you don’t need.
And all your meager thoughts and sentences are randomly sprouting wings (the very second they come into being, it seems) and, somehow, the very likely likelihood of (what in all likelihood would be) some seriously white-hot sex is... no big thing,
and even Miles and Mingus and Monk have, unprecedentedly, misplaced their swing (surely the problem couldn’t be with you or me?).
Hell, it could only mean one thing: the clouds, the wind, the traffic racing aimlessly around town, the slow stalagmitization of seconds into minutes into hours,
otherwise known as our Indentured Servitude to Time (otherwise known as this Post- Post-Modern Life of Ours),
they’re all larger parts of the sum of the numb, melancholy calm swelling before the storm of Monday morning comes rudely blundering in:
that vaguely ominous, imminent negative like an approaching tunnel out of which will eventually, inevitably, inescapably roar
a runaway freight train haulin’ in nothin’ for you, baby,
but bills, bad attitude and diminished expectations
of everything.
About the Author: Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
movement is king, right? that moment when the light changes and you can cross the street blacktop provides these flows, these guidelines I tell myself: stick with this peace it’s called being okay and it’s a full time job I don’t want to hide in words anymore in a jubilant bottomless purple sunset get closer to home close to the bone a surprising comfort deeper layer of moss to be so calm is so lucky to be so loved so lucky are you there now are you content did you ride away on that motorized bike?
About the Author: Jessica Wickens is a poet and editor based in Richmond, CA. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Denver Quarterly, Bone Bouquet, Posit, Ginosko, and Whiskey Island Magazine. She is a founding editor of Monday Night, a small press and former literary journal. Jessica co-authored a correspondence poetics collection, Everything Reused in the Sea: The Crow & Benjamin Letters (Mission Cleaners Books). Her chapbook, Things That Trust Us was published by Beard of Bees.
Image Credit: Harris and Ewing “Street views, pedestrians. Washington, D.C.” Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
When I said, Well, at least this will make good material for a book, I thought
everyone stored scraps of old relationships for later use, but he was horrified.
I said, That’s what writers do but he would not let it go,
this guy who is now an itchy memory and the stuff of anecdotes,
who’d just found out that a poet will secrete linens from your shelves
and keep them folded in a trunk, waiting to be shaken.
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, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
This morning the birds in your backyard disappear through sunflower wormholes.
Popsicle feathers blowing in the hot wind.
You try following but it doesn’t work like that.
So you drink some coffee instead and hum your favorite song.
Life is all about getting through grief then doing it again and again and again.
Did you know that if you Google “Who is the patron saint of regret?” there isn’t just one and there’s still not enough.
About the Author: Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Trick Is to Spill Your Guts Faster Than the Snow Falls” (Alleyway Theatre).
Image Credit: Public domain image originally from Field key to the land birds … Boston, B. Whidden,1899. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Sunday, you’ll have been dead a week. I sit at the kitchen table, laptop open in front of me, doing what I think you’d be doing in my place, writing something. You were a poet, a real one, a soldier with a flower in his helmet. I’m hunting and pecking when I suddenly hear the tinkling of Tibetan prayer bells. Five seconds – 10 max – pass before I realize it’s the new ringtone on my phone. A prim female voice announces, “Unknown caller.” I always just assumed Death would have the surly demeanor of the lunch ladies in a school cafeteria.
About the Author: Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and collages, is now available from Redhawk Publications He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.
Raining hard, mist steaming off roof & pavement, wind aswirl, thunder a series
of car wrecks in tunnels. I’m watching disruptions of summer through a window,
thinking in an hour I’ll be out in that, driving you thirty miles to the cupcake festival,
plying you with sweets: devil’s food, red velvet, tiramisu, whatever attracts you.
Smiles will break like skyward flashes, not erasing smudges on our lives right now,
but covering them with paint. Pumpkin writes your name in icing.
There might be cinnamon coffee cake, coconut, & the infrequent orange.
I’ll stick with vanilla, assuming weather doesn’t cancel the party or leave us stranded.
We’ll find out soon after I collect you, a soggy rat swimming for its life
or pleasure it senses ahead, dropped like a crumb from the hand of a child god.
About the Author: Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Image Credit: Raphaelle Peale “Sill Life with Cake” (1818) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
Plato in his allegory invented a cavern a tight cramped dark place with only a flickering fire to provide light
a miserable place for limited people who ignore the real world engrossed in the sad mindless flickering of their television
but now there are plans to expand the cave divided into sections of foreground middle ground and background whitewash the walls and renovate each area
appropriately flooding the space with reflected natural light decorated in earth tones and neutrals an expensive look that can be adapted to an upscale eatery.
About the Author: Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, deLuge, Stirring, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.
My favorite poet in town is a candy apple red '67 Pontiac GTO on a slow motion careen through the Mission at Sunday sunrise.
I hear that it once ran on nitro and Jim Beam; now overhauled, burning cleaner
Flames pluming off its rear wheels dissolve into Yakuza ink and air, all lost on those who only await the parting of iron bodega gates.
About the Author: Michael Layne Heath is a writer and poet, with a number of chapbooks published, primarily by Kendra Steiner Editions, San Antonio. He is also a veteran freelance music writer, and the compiler of My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters With Lou Reed, published by Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles. Michael lives a stone’s throw from the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.
Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Untitled mural located in Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, California” (2012) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
A formation of Canada Geese above this morning, so low their shadow grazed me, pointed me straight to a phrase my mother used when seeing shady politicians on the news: Piss Ant she’d pronounce, both syllables separately. Piss Ant she would hiss beneath her breath watching her second husband negotiate our alcohol, shifting stairs most nights. I couldn’t tell you exactly what that phrase meant, but the poet in me even then appreciated her meaning. Her cigarette dangling while lifting another laundry basket. Piss Ants, all of them was the only direction her language could take. It was the ‘50s. Marriage was where the woman in my mother had migrated. This was supposed to be her South.
About the Author: S Stephanie’s poetry, fiction and book reviews and fiction have appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines such as: Birmingham Poetry Review, Café Review, Cease, Cows, Clover & Bee, Hole in the Head Review, Iowa Review, One, Rattle, St. Petersburg Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Third Coast, and Turtle Island Review, She has three collections of poetry out. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and teaches poetry and writing on both the community and college level, works at a local hardware store, lives in Rollinsford, NH and respects cats.
You can learn more about her at her website which she rarely keeps up (apologies in advance). http://sstephanie.com/
As It Ought To Be 
