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1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Bill Howell Jo Guldi CC FILLING IN THE BLANKS We gave each other extra space to be separate because we were twins. The gift of distance annihilating the gist of since. Even when the other guy wasn’t there, each of us knew we weren’t that original. Still, I figured we might compare memories, cut through the glib clichés & rediscover a brotherly mirror to divert inverted reversals. But he drank so much, he said, that when he stopped, he couldn’t remember much. A convenient excuse or just the truth? Or a threat to his best reasons for starting to drink in the first place. Hey, it doesn’t matter, I said. Because we’ve each become who we are in spite of ourselves. Meanwhile, the sky flies by. With huge gaps between clouds as the world makes up its mind.  Bill Howell has five collections, including Porcupine Archery (Insomniac Press). He has recent work in The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, Event, Juniper, Naugatuck River Review, Prairie Fire, and Vallum. Colloquial, anecdotal, and grounded in a shared world, his poems have been widely anthologized. Born in Liverpool, England, he grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto for more than half his life. Bill was a producer-director and program exec at CBC Radio Drama for three decades. ABC and BBC-4 aired his Midnight Cab series, and Nightfall (NPR) has become an internet classic.
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1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Kayla Mroch Jo Guldi CC
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an animal rights film I met Texas as a last resort, A chainsaw to the timeline. Mince words or waste them The radio asks Government drone or alien spaceship Strangers taste like I’ve been here before. Does it feel like the end of the world in other countries too or just America? Two girls are tonguing beside me and I think of the subtlety of every day protests My favorite flavor is American riot Did you know the screams in the movie were killing floor pigs? I say. What? Says he. The director was a vegetarian. Kayla Mroch is a writer, book reviewer, and freelance editor. Her work has been published in Scar Tissue Magazine, Charm, and Boots and Babes Quaranzine. She lives in Texas with her family. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Alec Hershman Tom Bennett CC Chosen The need to touch oneself, like a stone sinks to the bottom of a pond. The haze of a soul’s diminishing porch brought about by bats, by cellulose between burning fingertips, & unread journals in the arches of a dilapidated church— yew boughs reaching in. And the whole planet sparkling with hills. Gooseflesh ascends the emporer, moss over trees, widow’s veils hung like smudges in the windows. Not a single family home. For miles, music smelled its way through the desert until the first apostle sprouted ears.  Alec Hershman is the queer author of Permanent and Wonderful Storage (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and The Egg Goes Under (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017). He has received awards from the KHN Center for the Arts, The Jentel Foundation, Playa, The Virginia Creative Center for the Arts, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. He lives in Michigan where he teaches writing and literature to college students. You can learn more at alechershmanpoetry.com.
1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Matthew M. C. Smith Brocken Inaglory CC Your Rosary Broke Your rosary broke into pieces. The barbed scorpion coils. People weave ways in warped light, gaze with glazed eyes. You sit at the gates of the city near the drains, spewing. Prayers are the breath of wind across sweeping sands. Lost Frequency There’s no wind in this canyon, no sun, no rain. The red beacon glares on the mountain. See his eyes, black-lidded, his body, skin and bone thin, a frame of blades in a strung gown, stick arms, where cannulas hang. Swollen-black pupils flicker left and right to dead-end valleys. The only way is red light. A near-bloodless body will fall, turn on this spleen of earth and with a single drop scream a lost frequency. Abyss Light a taper, listen to a note’s echo through the vault. The draught will shake the flame, at the end of a wave, there is silence. Stand with black all around you and feel anything there may be. Anyway you turn is eternity, as light sears the void. At the altar, stand before a window of celestial light. Dive through, dolphin-dark, plunge in shattered glass. through the abyss.  Matthew M. C. Smith is a 'Best of the Net'-nominated writer from Swansea, Wales. His work is published in the Lonely Crowd, Barren Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic and Cape Magazine. Twitter: @MatthewMCSmith Insta: @smithmattpoet Also on FB. Matthew M C Smith - poet/writer
1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Angela van Son witold kieńć CC Not feeling good Birds flying high don't know how I feel The sun in the sky won't know how I feel There's no new dawn no new day no new life for me Empathy is a lie you don't know how I feel Don't even try to know how I feel There's no new day no new light no new life for me  Angela van Son lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She writes poems and very short stories about being human. She likes to put a twist on things, whether it’s dark, humorous, philosophic or playful. As a coach she helps people change their life stories by getting things done, facing the rabbit holes of their choice and creating wonderful ever afters. In 2020 she published More than meets the I, a collaboration with her mother who is a prize winning photographer.
Find her on https://www.facebook.com/AngelavanSonAuthor or https://twitter.com/AngelavanSon, or read more at https://unassortedstories.wordpress.com/. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Giovanni Mangiante Peter Organisciak CC it runs like blood the stains on the table; the mold on the curtains; an empty fridge; a broken radio; an old vinyl snapped in half. the blood-rushing stupor, the nail-biting daze of falling in love with the wrong person. wet paper; smudged words and broken bottles. the things you didn’t mean but said anyway; the screaming memories of a book in flames. a squeezed mosquito in-between your palms; the stomach acid at the back of your throat; the relatives that no longer care; the snakebite of the one you loved. the danger and the beauty of a city fire-swallowed in absolute riot; the hair-pulling hammering inside your chest cracking your ribcage. That is poetry. That is writing. That is what it is: wanting the world from an empty room.  Giovanni Mangiante is a poet from Lima, Peru. He has work published in Heroin Love Songs, Rat's Ass Review, Three Rooms Press, Fearsome Critters, The Raven Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Crêpe & Penn, Open Minds Quarterly, and more. He has upcoming work in Newington Blue Press. In writing, he found a way to cope with BPD.
1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Matthew King Peter Organisciak CC Villanelle for Lost Time “My troubles all are in the past,” he told me, “but that ain’t so great: that’s how I know they’ll last and last. You think you want ’em over fast, but listen, man, I’ll tell ya straight: my troubles all are in the past - they sit there, in a heap, amassed, and ain’t a one lost any weight. That’s how I know they’ll last and last.” He stood to go, then, eyes downcast, he paused as if to contemplate. “My troubles all are in the past,” he said again, and then, aghast, kept on and didn’t hesitate: “that’s how I know they’ll last and last.” And stuck there, he’d repeat, steadfast, this thought he couldn’t overstate: “my troubles all are in the past - that's how I know they’ll last and last.”  Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto. He now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, counts birds, canoes around Wollaston Lake on calm mornings, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry.
1/31/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Charlotte Hamrick Alexander Lyubavin CC
FEEDING A LOVED ONE WITH DEMENTIA Lift the beige melamine cover From the plate, exclaim Over the pretty food colors Squash the color of daffodils Beets glistening like rubies A plot of mud colored meat (Don’t say this out loud) Lift the spoon to her slightly parted Lips, gently tap them Tap, tap, tap Murmur encouragement, try to Catch her eye Smile and nod when you do She smiles back A smidgen is allowed in As Alex reads the categories Remember to remind her to swallow With one eye on Jeopardy! and one On the spoon, continue encouragement, Say her name, exclaim over the delicious Smell of the food (Meat, not so much - don’t say this out loud) Wheel of Fortune appears, talk About Vanna's Dress the same shade As the beets, coax a bite in that falls Back out onto her chest Replace the bib with a clean one Take a break Worry about what will happen if she continues Not to eat Stare out the window at the darkness Of trees against the twilight sky Pick up the spoon The Delta of Me There were days I couldn’t lift my eyelids, much less the wholeness of my journey-flayed body. The loneliness, the lies, the years of repression pressed on me turning effort into jelly. All the days & years & decades hidden in my heart erupted, leaked unwanted blood, flowed hot & scared as the moment of their births. As much as I crave to feel forgiveness, resentment rises, a river on the cusp of flood. Each overflow deposits another layer of sediment, another crust to crack. They say time heals all wounds but I say the scabs remain, offerings to phantom fingernails scratching my flesh. Charlotte Hamrick’s creative work has been published in numerous online and print journals, most recently including The Citron Review and Emerge Journal. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction 2021, and was a Finalist for Micro Madness 2020. She reads for Fractured Lit and was the former CNF Editor for Barren Magazine. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and a menagerie of rescued pets where she sometimes does things other than read and write. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Tom Pescatore Fred Postles CC Gnostic Reading You are reading this with totemic vision. your eyes are like headlight winking stars in the void night over I-70 Kansas plains. your finger on the mount are like god's timeless hand tirelessly being all time, being anything, being same, meant as everything or; your smirk is of my creation out of nothing, becoming nothing, going back into nothing, after all being of nothing at the start you are reading this as a last dying light, going out. ...and the floorboards were golden so that you ran your tongue against them carving and chipping bone and screw so that you were forgetful unable to piece together what had come before so that you pulled your knees up to your chin blind to dirt and dust and scruff and tar so that you took to running knifed edges across grain drawing up curled veins so that each needled point penetrated the skin and left glitters of light in their path so that with each step the surface gave slightly sinking marking your footprints your face prints your palms so that at night it appeared as it did before but for the metallic taste so that even though your outside mildewed with collapse the inside shone brightly in the sun Don’t wake the camp with your bindle 50 yards into sagebrush field over the cattle crossing bridge duck under the barbed wire fence turn right 7/8th of a mile down the trail marked with hacked out squares dyed yellow over red to wood laid fence triangle shaped hot spring pool tucked along hillside tobacco root mountains overhead morning as the cool dew dries sunrise to take in the waters still and silent in the Montana sprawl  Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. He claims authorship of a novel the Boxcar Bop (RunAmok Books, 2018) and the poetry travel journal Go On, Breathe Freely! (Chatter House Press, 2016).
1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by John Dorsey Peter Organisciak CC The Prettiest Girl in Santa Cruz, California nurses a single flat beer all afternoon her problems dropping like flies as she slips her number to the vegan bartender who won’t be with her when she goes to bail her father out of a tribal prison it doesn’t matter that her lips are a point of pride that he’ll never notice her song carrying in the weightless boneyards of the dead where anything shaped like a fist gets pointed at the moonlight. The Prettiest Girl in Lawrence, Kansas has never looked across an entire prairie for the bones that form her history her lips are rocky mountain songs full of kindness & sunshine she is a red-tailed hawk before the first sign of trouble she’d laugh if you told her that even a willow tree was born with a taste for blood. The Prettiest Girl in Worcester, Massachusetts never dreamed that she would dance swan lake with a needle in her arm but now she can do anything you want for $60 in under twenty minutes flat as the same tired birds circle overhead just waiting for the music to stop.  John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at [email protected].
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