​Fernando Peralta Cruz CC




Languish, or 3 moods in 3 hours

1.
Sometimes you don’t want to go out
What’s there to do, really?
There are only two roads out of town
and your feet know them by heart.
You’ve visited the stores on the Avenue 
repeatedly and worry the help will think 
you have no life, which is true but you prefer 
they not come to that conclusion yet.
Your car is tired of driving to the same places: 
the supermarket, Home Depot, your sister’s group home.
The dogs on the street don’t acknowledge your existence
the geese and goslings are not scared of you
and neither is that gang of boys riding 
chopped bikes past without notice.
Almost all relationships have become long distance
affairs, and we know what happens to them.
You gaze at everyone and everything 
and are somewhat amazed that gaze 
has become a dirty word.

2.
Funerals are not that important
You’ve curated your funeral the past 30 years 
down to the set list, the guest list, 
and who gets to read a poem. 
What’s important is the sense of loss 
felt by those you’ve left behind.
You’re a romantic at heart passing your hours 
with what if’s, should’ves and why nots.
You have finally come to understand
nobody’s as happy as they are on Facebook
nobody’s as angry as they are on Twitter
nobody’s as beautiful as they are on Instagram
Everyone’s as desperate as they seem…

3.
You don’t ask for much
a walk through Central Park on a sunny day
sharing a bottle of wine with friends at an outdoor cafe
Jacob deGrom throwing strikes against the Braves
orchestra seats for a new Tom Stoppard play
new pathways of thought as you continue to age
no more envy of Instagram poets’ accolades
fresh declarations of love graffitied on the Palisades
this God Damn imposter syndrome to fade away.
Recognizing the bewildered smile on a lost friend’s face.

​

             ​Tony Webster CC



​
Born a Watchtower


Long hot summer nights bundled akin to newborn Jesus
Transfixed on cartoons, baptized in flickering blues
Sweat beaded around my throat like a skin tight rosary

From down the hall一 beyond an empty kitchen  
Mom’s dreams no longer spoke through her lips
No guttural shouts, screams, or incoherent rambles

I think of Jimi Hendrix; Dad said he choked in his sleep
& slipped into cold silence
My young mind promised she’d rise to morning hunger

May this be love or impatience, but I walked in her room
Passed a night stand with a closed big book next to open Heineken
Tip-toed over a wrinkled bible & painkillers hidden in carpet

I pressed my ear against her chest, held my breath to hear hers
I waited for an exhale一 hoped to feel her lifeless body expand
Sometimes when I doubted my senses, I’d whisper mom 

Then rock her shoulders, cradle limp arms, until she returned to me
Though annoyance followed, I murmured a prayer at god
& thanked him for not donating her soul to a collection basket

​

               ​Tony Webster CC



​
On the precipice of their 50th birthday, the overachiever realizes it’s too late to fuck up
 
to drop the biscuit
and take up with someone           20 years younger
smoke in the tub smoke during dinner smoke in bed
make salad with the carrots of    so many obligations
quieten the domestic din with    a solo ride
wherever the hell they want  
no whining or neat packaged snacks allowed
 
and
 
quit the gym                               forgo the extra helping of greens
throw out the map of knowing
torch the considered plans               with the lighter
they stole from the corner convenience store
in a town they’ve never been
 
and also
 
forget to pick up the kids from school
ignore the pleas                      for every piece of themselves
skip the team training to get too drunk
the liquor burn the slur of memory
 
then
 
hit on the hot dean
punch the colleague        who asked them to make coffee
in a professional meeting              piss on the pretention and preening
teach students off the record
blow up the learning objectives                 withered assessments
with youthful verve                         the smirk of a smart aleck
 
because
 
they can’t tell that younger self the fracture
of their personas                  the rejections of face
will soften and mold to their frame
like lying                 in some unreturnable overpriced bed
​

               ​Tony Webster CC



One Morning When We Rose Early
 
Memory of her voice, her crown, on the phone in the dark, 
as we planned for a sunrise over the Catskills, and the next day 
 
as I waited for the light to come over the hill, for her to come 
and be the light before the light. This was before I understood 
 
that wanting comes from somewhere hurt. Her breasts like the bed 
I wanted to die in, her voice like the color green, her face 
 
like the harvest moon, dipped in wax. I wanted to touch her body 
the way I had wanted to be touched by my mother: gently, just before sleeping, 
 
sexless as stones. I waited on the hill and she came before dawn 
as she said she would, came under my blanket to warm with me our bodies 
 
as the sky bloomed from navy to white, the last star holding stubborn 
to watered silk. She came and shivered with me and the icy sun 
 
and we sang rounds, me and this mother I had made for myself 
in the Great North out of flesh and cloth.

​

             ​Tony Webster CC




Loop 4


Can we imagine
                                   we belong?  Have you seen
the sun?
                                   Hopefully not
 
                                   Now the despair
sets in.

                                                 Upon four weeks prior having been
                                                 “diagnosed” 
                                                 there were passionate observations
                                                 of life being objectively 
                                                “flawed”
            
                                                What want is will never ever be.

                                    Take two swings & get the 
fuck home.  This
                                     is not an experiment but
a test &
                                     who cares what generation
it is there’s 
                                     no capital for us to change.

Vacancy is a sweat coming off the brow.

This is a photograph at Tule Lake
a prison built inside
a prison

                                                   no camps no cages

earn triple points & invest!

Hannity will trim your tree
                            they are tree                                         specialists.  Partners
                            in mercy

Purchase to support
cancer look crumpled like
two uninstalled car seats
folded on the front porch.

Tired of rising at scarecrow time
tired of extra swings & tired of the twelfth mile.

Thinking in last season’s shoes w/ holes for rain
water that Great American Replenisher what does the president send
citizens whom the Great American He 
would shun & not speak to?  Large & ill-fitting 
sexually oriented material?  
                                                                                                     Shove the slot full.

Tired of the Huge Tire Event!
why so many signs to enquire 
w/ erosion?  Again, trash            & a number for concern

piles under the mail box.

                                                                                                       Today Kavanaugh “plowed through”

Tired

at the foothills of the Unholy Hill
w/ oversize box of Ultra Plush
to deliver tired of Thinking how
unimportant to the lives of the
customers Thinking is & feeling
as a puddle of melted body a little 
branch broken off the tree by power
company fallen on hood of car.

It is not 
in left sinus
now so why cry?

                                               cry more

​

​
Ryan Mills is a letter carrier in Portland, OR and a co-founding editor of Old Pal Mag.
​

               ​Tony Webster CC



Above The World So High

He shoulders off the bus with
nothing to his name but a 
soft pack of Camel Lights and
a brass Zippo he stole 
from a convenience store 
outside Elko, Nevada.

Shadows haunt his eyes.

She imagines ghosts escorting
him down the bus stairwell, 
crowding the sidewalk
as he smokes away the last
three-hundred miles of icy highway.

He asks about the boy:

the one with his grandmother’s 
eyes and her father's complexion
who is kind to spiders 
and hugs too hard
and pronounces els like double-Us 
and wants Pluto to be a planet again

—but after five years
he doesn’t know much of that.

All he wants to know
is which lullaby she sings 
when only a song will do,
so she tells him
about little stars and how they
               twinkle 
               like 
               diamonds
and she offers a thrift store coat
with a plane ticket to Boise
tucked away in the breast pocket.

A quick goodbye and
he disappears in the turnstile
with his entourage of ghosts
and when she returns home, 
she finds the boy in the backyard 
watching airplanes
cast vapor trails
above the world so high.

               ​Steve Johnson CC




We Are All Poorly Made

I’m watching the galaxies unveil their
hideous, old-woman faces.

It is that time of night.
A clockwork bird, an attic ghost, a mosquito, and me
in uncomfortable company.
We are all mistakes.

The bird is broken. She ticks
when she turns her head. To see everything
she peers with her lonely gem-stone eye.
The other was lost a long time ago.
We don’t talk about it.

The ghost was made from all the hopes of a household,
a reminder of regret.
It is aging poorly, like everything
else, fraying along its dreamy edges.

The mosquito, well,
mosquitos have always been a metaphor.
They were supposed to teach us to hate secrets. Instead
it loops in the air like a drunken diva.

I flicker in and out of connection.
I can barely breathe.
The constellations make me dizzy,
with their ugly, spinning heads.
Everything that exists cannot hold its balance. 


​

​Greta Hayer received her MFA at the University of New Orleans and has work appearing or forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Booth, Maudlin House, Cossmass Infinites, and Flint Hills Review. She received a bachelor's degree in history from the College of Wooster, where she studied fairy tales and medieval medicine. Her column, “In Search of the Dream World,” can be found at Luna Station Quarterly. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and their two alien cats.

               ​Tony Webster CC



Ward of the State

He was brought in in handcuffs, 
this young man I lived with for years,
his parents itinerant actors, I was told,
who left him with an aunt, one of whose 
johns tried to drown him in a bathtub.

I was representing his legal guardian,
Willie long since a ward of the state,
too old for adoption, ever mischievous,   
now arrested for trying to steal a purse,
pushing the old woman who wouldn’t let go.  

He’d been selling loose joints on the ferry,
rumor had it among the boys still in the home.
Now he sat there for my counsel one more time,
crying like the child he had no chance to be.
“Mr. D, I screwed up. I’m so sorry.”

He was ashamed I had to see him this way.
and that’s how Willie always was when we
were alone, anxious I like him, but when        
others were around, he played a mad clown,
flashing that smile of his, light as a feather,
rising above his sumo-wrestler’s body.

When he stole the agency car for a joy ride,
missing two days with three younger boys 
he bribed to go with him, I had him sent 
to a lock-down. That was three years ago.
I had not seen him since. Now this.  

I patted him on the shoulder as he cried 
and looked away. “Be strong for yourself,”
I told him. The guard walked him back.  
That was the last I ever saw Willie.
I knew the whole world had failed him,
and I was part of that world, and I hated it.    

​
​

                 ​Groveland Media CC

​

​

​

​

           ​Pawel Maryanov CC



Anesthesia 

Your childhood is a cluster of bodies
ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph: 
no sugar until you're allergy free 
and here's your mother deciding you're too fat 
to wear a two piece at five years old your
older brother pummelling you, you take up 
too much oxygen space love whatever you exist 
too much you mustn't even glare back at him
your parents tell you, just ignore him, don't get 
involved in your own humiliation, 
so your eyes grow apart like a rabbit's, keen to every 
flicker of hostility, your maturity your protection, 
and here's your father complimenting  
your curves, how alluring they are you are
a sexy woman you are thirteen years old and being told
your toes look good enough to eat so you see, you cannot 
just live in this body it's been provocative from the moment 
it was judged female you've balanced that careful egg of gender 
on your head it weighs the world and breaks from time to time 
and your mother mistakes you for a shell: she pours 
all her hates and fears into you all her personal sex failures, 
all she feels she's owed, until there is no space left under all that  
there is no space to feel anything ugly, anything real, anything at all, 
there never can be for the girl they saw, who is nothing 
but a sheet of wiped glass, a mirror with a cartoon bow drawn on 
maybe that's why I'm burning all the time
now I've left, the feeling is finally
returning to me now.

​