11/30/2021 Poetry by Danny Shot 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. ![]() Danny Shot’s WORKS (New and Selected Poems) was published in March 2018 by (CavanKerry Press). Danny is currently an Associate Editor of A Gathering of the Tribes (https://www.tribes.org/) online He was featured on the television show State of the Arts, NJ in July 2018. Danny lives in Hoboken, NJ (home of Frank Sinatra and baseball) where he is poet-in-residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. Danny Shot was longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. Check out his new website: https://dannyshot.com/ 11/30/2021 Poetry by Carson Sandell 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 ![]() Carson Sandell is a twenty one year old queer and demisexual poet from San Jose, California. He’s currently studying creative writing with a concentration in poetry at UC Riverside and hopes to become a teacher one day. Beyond writing he is simply a coffee lover, cat enthusiast, and fuzzy sock collector. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Sandra L. Faulkner 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 ![]() Faulkner researches, teaches, and writes about relationships in NW Ohio where she knits, runs, and writes poetry about her feminist middle-aged rage. Her poetry + images appear in places like Writer’s Resist, Literary Mama, Ithaca Lit, and Gulf Stream. She lives with her partner, their warrior girl, and three rescue mutts. https://www.sandrafaulkner.online/ 11/30/2021 Poetry by Meghan Sterling 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. ![]() Meghan Sterling’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, The West Review, Colorado Review, Pacifica Literary Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and many others, and was the winner of Sweet Literary’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest, Winner of Equinox’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest, and a Finalist in River Heron Review’s 2021 Annual Poetry Contest and Gigantic Sequins’ 2021 Annual Poetry Contest. She is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review, a Hewnoaks Artist Colony resident in 2019 and 2021, and her debut collection, These Few Seeds, came out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. She and her family live in Portland, Maine. Read her work at meghansterling.com. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Ryan Mills 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. 11/30/2021 Poetry by C.W. Blackwell 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. ![]() C.W. Blackwell is an American crime fiction author and poet. His recent poetry has appeared in Close to the Bone's 4.4 Series, Versification, The Five-Two, Punk Noir, and Dead Fern Press. His upcoming poetry collection, River Street Rhapsody, will appear in Spring 2022 from Dead Fern Press. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Greta Hayer 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. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Anthony DiMatteo 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. ![]() Anthony DiMatteo's recent poems have sprouted in The American Journal of Poetry, Cimarron Review, Clade Song, Ekphrastic Review and ucity Review. His current book of poems In Defense of Puppets has been hailed as, 'a rare collection, establishing a stunningly new poetic and challenging the traditions that DiMatteo (as Renaissance scholar) claims give the poet 'the last word'' (Cider Press Review). A chapbook Fishing for Family is out from Kelsay Books. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Aekta Khubchandani ![]() Aekta Khubchandani is a writer and poet from Bombay. She is the founder of Poetry Plant Project, where she conducts month-long poetry workshops. She is matriculating her dual MFA in Poetry & Nonfiction from The New School in New York, where she is the Reading and Community Development Assistant. Her fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect,” is nominated for Best American Short Fiction anthology. Her personal essay, “Holes in the Body” is featured on LitHub’s Best of Weekly Literary and her poem, “Sun spotting” is nominated for Best of Net 2021 by Nurture Literary. Her film, “New Normal” whose script she has written, won the Best Microfilm award at Indie Short Fest by Los Angeles International Film Festival. She has published works in Entropy, Passages North, Speculative Nonfiction, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s working on her first book of hybrid poems. 11/30/2021 Poetry by Sophia Holme 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. ![]() Sophia Holme (she/her) is a queer poet and writer, made in Canada but now based in Oxford, England. Her work can be found in Molotov Cocktail, Not Deer Magazine, Horse Egg Literary and elsewhere. She runs, drinks a lot of coffee and enjoys reading bits of several novels at once. She tweets from @holmesophia |
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