You have no face
Why would you
dressed in black bitumen
oak-beam windows open to the wakes.
Westerlies funnel through
drying silhouettes on the line.
They carry the weight
between plane trees stretching. They tell you
It's time to go.
And your pulse is steady
Even grey-haired men in red anoraks
can hear you over engines thrumming with clean oil
They are new.
But you are old. You chug these days.
Last century smells of tar and varnish still shine
in places where limestone rains don't reach,
cracks mapping the bow
A  lifeboat is tucked up with a small buoy
You are safe. Anise in the air,
this wind comes with gifts: winged, webbed.
It's in a good mood.
There's a seat that needs filling
A sit up and beg with an empty basket

 

 

Afraid at Stadsparken

 

A bee or was it a wasp

landed on my shoulder

 

mistaking me for a

strawberry or a stamen

 

Disappointed, it fled

into the mysteries

 

of the beech and elm,

the shingled hut with grass hair

 

Maybe it smelled

Coke or prawns

 

leftover from

the picnic lunch

 

The youngies froze

waiting for the sting

suck or attack

 

It takes a lifetime

to get your fears

in the right order.

 

A bee sting

the least of them.

 

 

Julie Maclean. Originally from Bristol, UK, Julie is now based in Victoria, Australia. Shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize (Salt, UK) in 2012 and winner of the Geoff Stevens Poetry Prize (UK), her debut collection of poetry, ­When I saw Jimi, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing,UK in June 2013. Poetry and short fiction features in leading international journals including The Best Australian Poetry.Forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review. Blogging at  juliemacleanwriter.com

 

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JOHN MAHONEY

 

the weight of the moon

 

 

there is no middle of the night

only beginnings, recurring endlessly

 

last night i woke at two am

roused by a body's vigilance

 

alert, for any hint of pain

 

a woodland deer wary, agitated

downwind from his hunter

 

into the night woods i walked

down the drive to the intersection

 

a full moon faintly set the street aglow

i can feel you in the muggy air tonight

 

in the blue of the night sky

in the weight of the moon

 

to become as nil then, yet

alert, in this soft blue nothing

 

promise me

 

there is no caution, no road sign

for the tragedies and the pain

which living brings

 

as i watch

my aunt grieve

for a third child dead

 

and yet

 

a cardinal

bright red

within the window frame which

all winter has given me only

white and grey.

 

Writer John Mahoney lives in the woods above Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. He practiced law as a public defender for fifteen years and continues his legal research and writing. His poems will be found  published by The Monarch Review, Northwind Magazine Quarterly Review; The FutureCyclePress Poetry Anthology; The Garbanzo Literary Journal;Petrichor Review, Issue Three; Kaleidoscope Magazine, and Rose & Thorn Journal, Spring 2012, a forthcoming FutureCycle Press Poetry Anthology, and in the UK, by IMPress. In the UK his poetry is published by the IMPress.

 





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 PATRICIA J. McLEAN

 

Greening

 



My bathroom window reveals

the yellow house couple

cleaning gutters

She holds the ladder,

He is 3 stories up

hands gloved, but still cold

he pulls muck, leaves and mud,

and drops it black and rich to

moss-slick concrete by her feet.

 

The white house two doors

down is empty

(since last spring)

grass is beginning to grow

where a border collie's nervous

track circled the backyard

there is a vacant tunnel

under the doghouse

an open garage door

blank and black

welcomes feral creatures.

 

Autumn, and we are greening

having passed the summer drought

into heavy root-loosening rain

yesterday, a warm southerly

dropped trees and lifted

glass from a greenhouse roof

swirling panes upward like a tornado.

 

 

Patricia J. McLean is co-founder and non-fiction editor of Eloghi Gadugi Journal. She writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction and has published two chapbooks of poetry, and a novel (Bartlett House). Her work has appeared in Trillium, Panache, and other publications. She is currently working on a novel.

 

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JBMULLIGAN

 

fire in the rain

 

The rain machine runs steady and loud.

The clock is toting the minutes up

second by second, like counting nails.

A world of drums. Of steady hearts

and hummingbird wings. The night is wide

and has a room for every guest

(some rooms are shared in joy or sleep

or anger like acid eating at time)

and I'm in mine, far from the pain

that burns and crumbles a distant life

to whom a different rain is just

a noise beyond the crackle and roar,

the timbers cracking, the sagging roof,

the windows barred, the locked-in scream.

 

 

JBMulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines, including recently, Angle, Muse, riverbabble, Red Fez, and Gone Lawn, has had two chapbooks published, and has appeared in multiple volumes of the anthology, Reflections on a Blue Planet as well as the anthology, Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets.

 

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JIM MURDOCH

 

A Matter of Fact

 

Gina hugs me every day –

not exactly every day –

just every day that matters.

 

It doesn't matter that she

doesn't hug me every day.

It matters that she hugs me.

 

It's not the hugs that matter

but they do and that's a fact

which is why I hug back and

 

try not to hold on for dear life.

 

 

The Seasons

 

When Death brought forth her last course

I was not at all surprised

to find that it was seasoned

with bitter herbs.

 

"Spring is fresh, Sir,

summer hot and fall so rich

but winter is a dish that

is best served chilled

and in very small portions."

 

"You have the rest of your life

to finish it."

 

"Enjoy."

  

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living just outside Glasgow. His poetry has appeared regularly in small press magazines from the seventies on. In the nineties he turned to prose writing and has now published three novels His latest book is a collection of thematically-linked short stories entitled Making Sense.

 

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EDWARD MYCUE

 

This Lady in the Supermarket

 



came up to my mom in the margarine section

where Mom was trying to get the brand she wanted

edged-down from (sttutter, stutter) the stack

on the top shelf and started yammering about how

you should only use Imperial. (I think that's what

I remember of what Mom told me.) Mom said

"no, look" that has cottonseed oil in it and that's

hydronogated or something like that and that starts-up

the machine inside you that makes the no-good/rat

bad cholesterol. Fay was there, too, with Mom.

Fay wanted Fleischmans' margarine. This lady

told about how she had one of the kinds of lupus

the not so bad kind (and it could be there are more

than two kinds). Her daughter had had the really

bad kind and died from medical mistreatment

after getting cortisone shots and how just about

everything, organs especially, began to go wrong,

and how she died at around thirty and how this lady

said you have to watch your diet in the supermarket.

 



 

Edward Mycue's most recent publication is from Paul Green's Spectacular Diseases Press in Peterborough, England: Song of San Francisco, 2012. His first online book is I Am A Fact Not A Fiction, 2009, (Jo-Anne Rosen's Wordrunner, Petaluma, CA). In 2008 a volume of selected poems Mindwalking was published by Laura Beausoleil's Philos Press, Lacey, CA.

 

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KRIS RYAN

  

Road Trip

 



I approach the next time with the excitement of a dog with its head out a car
window, tongue flailing like a pink tree branch in a gale, saliva like rain on
the windshield of the vehicle behind. But you should know I am like my
smartphone when I try to run an app and it hasn't been plugged in for days. If
you'd connect me to the mini USB, I'd light up like a handheld Times Square
Christmas, help you imagine yourself there, a bow on your head, tied beneath
like the chinstrap of a baseball helmet, waiting for someone to bring you home.
I am trying to hit this one out of the park, but I can't see the ball out of
the pitcher's hand and I am in the batter's box barefoot, behind him is a pink
sky sunset Caribbean where the ocean licks the shore and spits up stones and
conches wherein it recorded its voice. You are there in a red bikini, and I
imagine sliding my hand down your arm the same way the wind slides its hands
over fields of wheat, and I compare the bumps of your knuckles to crab claws as
we let the ocean substitute toes for its teeth. At the snap of fingers I become
the dog again, but the window is rolled up and I am left to wonder what smells
linger beyond, pawing at the glass as if asking them to osmose through.

 

 Kris Ryan is a writer from West Springfield, MA, and a 2011  graduate from Westfield State University with a B.S. in Mathematics and  Economics. He was twice the MA Junior Bowling state champion, and has one  sanctioned perfect 300 game. He also enjoys card games, SCRABBLE, Chess, and Boston sports.

 

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SHERRIE THERIAULT



  

Qamdo



I want to drill wells and pump this saltwater onto my roof allowing it to dry out naturally; instead I cry and the water evaporates leaving salty trails down my cheeks. I wish to be the work of sunshine and breeze, I wish to be poetic and interesting to tourists, alas I am a tear jerking crybaby, I barely interest myself. Misery set to music can pass itself off as opera, with no notes misery is nothing but a saltlick and a quagmire. I am cheered up mostly by the way that time passes and the world spins on leaving me to believe I am more and less important than I have heard and that blame is a thing flung in frustration and cleaned up in solitude. Sluiced through a sometimes dark and narrow past I am freer now in this bright, bright day and offer myself tears and all to a future with some brine and few snapshots.

 

 

Failure of Imagination

 

The failure of imagination feels worse than it looks; it's that rancid oily coating on the skin that I abhor. The sweat that appears when sloth becomes a burden, the confusion of an unused intellect, the mumbled acquiescence of a weak will, creep me out of the permission that I wished to offer myself but can not accept. The languishing mind that I left to wither in the confines of my skull requires my perseverance. Falling down, giving up, throwing in terry cloth objects is impermissible, I must pluck up my willingness and apply whatever drops of genius I possess to every muscle fiber I can find. So much has been made available to me and I must return that favor. You see imagination only fails me if I have failed it first.

 

 

Sherrie Theriault, writer and outsider artist lives in northwest New Jersey where she writes villain-free fiction for children, creates coloring books for all ages, writes daily inspiration books for the recovery community and has other works of collected poetry. Feel free to contact her at www.SerendipitousGallery.com

 

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BOB WALICKI

 

The List

We place our clothes on the mattress next to each other
laid out to keep from wrinkling—
your dress shirt with the glitter attracting the cat hair and lint.
That working class fallout that settles over everything.
And I can’t help but think how much
our empty clothes resemble us,
a little exhausted  rumpled with the compliance of any poly cotton blend.
 
At the end of the night my hands are feeling for the dark
of your hands,
eyes closed to the extended weather forecast at eleven.
But what if I added light to this memory?
Poured it through sheer curtains.
Held  on to it the way yellow does to that empty coffee cup,
lost and sparkling in dishwater.
Warm as my hands that rub the stains off of it,
touch the door as I leave, the edge of your thigh.
 
What if the backyard mimosa rebounds,
grows again next summer?
Fills the view of a two lane road,
becomes the wall again of green
no one can see past?
But the  trees  behind our house sashaying like awkward teenagers
or shampoo commercial models—
luxuriant and ridiculous,
as if
all they wanted was our attention.
But all they know how to do
is turn their backs to us. Shake
their chemically treated hair
and a few thousand leaves for us 
to rake up every October.
 
It is Summer, a Friday.
And we are sitting in a diner making a list
on a ripped napkin on how to change our lives.
 
You take an aching back, tuition, a mortgage and promises,
add to this a glass of wine, the scent of mimosa,
the drive home with the window rolled down
my hand on your thigh
every part of yes this is equal to.

 

 

Robert Walicki, A freelance poet and observer of the invisible, has found inspiration through writing and poetry over the years. He is a member of The Pittsburgh Writer's Studio and founder of The literary reading series, Versify at The East End Book Exchange. He has had his poetry published in most recently in Blast Furnace, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Quotable. When he’s not writing, he keeps busy organizing the chaos of creation daily with his wife Lynne and two cats, Buttons and Josie.

 

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ALYSSA YANKWITT



  

New Year's Day

 

I light this Yahrzeit candle.

Flame stares at me, the yellow eye of death,

a reminder: I've known you longer

dead than alive.

 

Standing in the kitchen with you

at six years old, I watched

you light a candle for your mother—

"Why don't we blow it out?" I asked.

 

A memorial candle encased in glass

wick buried in jaundiced wax, braided

synthetic fibers of years spent

together     apart

 

distilled into the tiniest flame blazing

toward heaven, a commemoration

of life     cut short.

 

What you didn't say is:

this is how we keep the dead

how we say their prayers

how we spill our grief—

all this religion tradition

I don't understand.

  

 

Alyssa Yankwitt is a poet, teacher, bartender and earth walker. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Stone Highway, Halfway Down the Stairs, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Bone Parade, and Cease, Cows. Alyssa has incurable wanderlust, enjoys drinking whiskey, hates writing about herself in the third person, and loves a good disaster.

 

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