Issue #106

Simon MacCulloch

Laugh Tracks

Did Satan die here skinless, scalded cat, each hair a crime
shed wriggling in the alleys and the gutters of our town,
and turned to fishes, finless, mouths agape and belching slime
which giggling strumpets licked and blew in bubbles, swallowed down?
Was that a wicked time?

They hunted down the Devil with a needle and a thread,
to sew him into suit and tie and make him stand up straight;
they talked him out of evil, planted angels in his head
to show him how the blackest cat could jump through Heaven’s gate
to join the sainted dead.

But that leaves seven lives to live, and each must tell its tale,
and after good and evil something wild will prowl the night;
no sin too dreadful to forgive, no good too pure to fail,
but laughter asks no pardon, owns no aim save raw delight,
admits of no betrayal.

So now the cats are shrieking out of every TV screen,
and we who watch know well that they were ordinary folk
till laughter turned their leaking eyes that nyctaloptic green
to see through to the punchline of the self-inflicted joke
that tells us what we mean.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a wide variety of publications, including Reach Poetry, Altered Reality, Spectral Realms and many others.

Thom C. Addington

St. Sebastian’s Day

Christ spots me from the tympanum,
a leopard schooled poorly in passing—
Bandaged love-bites, bar me not.

I pace the narthex
pawing, silent, the stoup:
My church moretta binds a busy tongue.

This nave catwalks a set of shifts:
I pass pew one as penitent,
pew two, the Magdalene.

By three, I should be Paul,
but I must have missed Damascus;
no, this is not Larkin’s serious house.

He lifts, exalted, to bells and bowing,
and I wander to the sacristy
to peek through the aumbry’s fretwork

and find Mount Zion desolate.

Untoungable, the button
gags me, parts my mouth.

Thom C. Addington (he/him) is a queer, Catholic, rural Southern poet with Appalachian roots raised on Rappahannock land in King & Queen County, Virginia. He currently serves as Associate Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at Reynolds Community College.

Betty Stanton

Visitation

Gods speak when we are half-asleep, their voices beating
through the pulse — soft, persistent, shaped like breathing.
Sometimes they borrow familiar mouths, the faces of lovers
or the dead, and whisper in the cadences of comfort, lull us
so we won’t wake too quickly. They walk barefoot through
sleeping minds, their weight lighter than the memory of air.
Each step leaves a trace of light, bright, lingering behind eyes.
When we wake, it comes leaking through curtains, shifts to call
of the children from the next room. Old gods disguised as fever.
They burn low in the body, warning the humming spine, they
shimmer with smoke, metal, the scene of ozone before rain.
When we move, they move inside of us, shared breathing,
hymns of the body in motion. Prophets are only voices that
failed to wake, their hearts stuttering at the edge of dawn,
tethered to the brightness beneath their dreams. We forget
our names, and countless Heavens bend closer, pressing
their mouths against ours until our breath mingles, joins
every prayer that has been said inside a quiet space. Each
begins in dreams we inherit, shards of light we cannot claim
or release. When the gods leave, they do it slowly, warmth
slipping from the skin after the touch of heat. We wake with
hands empty, our throats aching from hymns sung in the space
between. The old gods hover at our slow breath, guards against
the absence in their wakes. We open our eyes and find the ceiling
unchanged, the air still glowing with the memory of the divine.

Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and teaches in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from the University of Texas – El Paso and also holds a doctorate in educational leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social

Lauren Poplock

The House That Never Sleeps

The house keeps watch long after we depart,
its windows open-eyed against the night.
It holds our secrets in a patient heart.

Each room recalls the moment we fell apart—
the vows gone quiet, silence wound too tight.
The house keeps watch long after we depart.

The floorboards ache beneath a phantom cart
of dreams we meant to wheel toward the light.
It holds our secrets in a patient heart.

The porch lamp flickers at the evening’s start,
a beacon we once trusted as our right.
The house keeps watch long after we depart.

We left our shadows there,
a matched pair—smart
in how they lingered, hesitant to fight.

It holds our secrets in a patient heart.
And though we swore we’d make a cleaner start,
in rooms untouched by any former night—

the past gathers softly on the lawn, polite.
The house keeps watch long after we depart;
it holds our secrets in a patient heart.

Lauren Poplock is an avid writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in the Live Poet’s Society — Fall 2025 Anthology Inside of Me, and her work is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review and Gargoyle Online Magazine.

Eleanor Carpenter

Transfiguration

Inspired by the lives of a mother and daughter who were Dutch settlers in
South Africa in the late 17th century.

I.
In Delft women were safe, my mother said.
The king pressed the buildings 
together, one above another,
so there were no secret places.
He perfused his flattened land with water,
keeping men’s eyes low.

She thought our fathers gained notions of 
potency from this estranged landscape.
But that is not all:
nature, in this land, transfigures our men into beasts. 

When papa died I saw it happen.

His pain seethed through the bed curtain,
refracting strangely in the valley’s clefts.
She sent me out.
I lay beneath pale rock, listening.

When I woke, a difference. 
In soundless air, motes were charged with something. 

I rose. He stood by a thorn tree.
My father’s muscle under a dun pelt.
Transfixed by his assessing stare, 
I was motionless,
as mama instructed: sculpture, not prey-able flesh.
Decision made, he disengaged, stalking
into his wild death-life. 
His pained bellow had become a roar.

II.

My fatherless sons’ snares failed again.
The master had no work for them.
We slaughtered the last ox, and I considered my shape:
some meat remaining.
I baited the master’s snare with myself, 
to catch his beastly aspect.

My children ate. Our frames unsharpened. 
Stronger, we walked to church again.
They ran, supple-limbed and free towards the congregation which
 —astoundingly—
retreated and fell silent, eyes on my new roundness.

“Stay here”. 
Minutes later, the elder came outside
with an admonishment: 
“You must live a better life”.

I thought my age had spared me from
the trap of womanhood. We had no mirror. 

III.

At my sister’s no-name baptism my mother’s heart was stoned with shame.
Afterwards, returning home, 
she saw a thatcher pose his fistful of reeds
obscenely as I passed.

Without marriage I was no longer safe, 
my mother said. 
My heart contracted at the prospect:
I’d seen the yoke of wedlock and its frayed aftermath.
Just meet him, she said. 

He sat waiting in his small room, 
hands turned upwards on a trestle,
as if showing me the cleanness of his palms.
I laughed at his supplication,
then covered my mouth in case I offended.
Acknowledging his incongruity, he smiled.
I put my hand in his.

Eleanor Carpenter is a new writer from London, England.

Scott Westcott

Chance Encounter

Bumped into an old co-worker today
a friend, really,
who for a time
knew more of my life than
anyone else, and I of his.
An intimacy, dare I call it,
nurtured by
proximity of desks
and similarities of age
and circumstance.

Both of us tumbling through
those years of kids evolving
into grown people
and marriages wearing threadbare
from neglect and responsibly
along with the unspoken terror of
our youth slipping away
one eight-hour
keyboard clattering
stretch
at a time.

Seeing each other now
after all these years
which we each navigated
devoid of the grace and comradery
we once allotted one another
should have justified an embrace
that lingered long enough to convey appreciation
even love.

But instead, we shook hands
agreeing not much was new
that all was well
and vowing to get together
soon
with the understanding
that we never will.

Scott Westcott is a poet, journalist and writer living in Erie, Pennsylvania. He draws inspiration from time spent outdoors, with family, or anywhere his phone is not. He turns to fiction and poetry to try to seek calm and clarity amid the ever-growing chaos in which we exist.

Mischelle Anthony

My father fails

to prepare me for
you name it: just out

of hospital, his bedside
pineapple he couldn’t stand

to cut himself slathering
and exotic as the copier in the guest

room corner, brush of powder
blue ruffle with every tax

return. Right
knee shattered by Mom’s

ribcage in the wreck, Dad
wrote to the kid

who crushed her. You must
be blaming yourself, said Grandpa’s

rollerball, feeling pretty
bad. I’m writing to say, don’t. Accidents, sometimes

tragic, happen. A FAX dot matrixed
its way onto Grandma’s Queen

Anne dresser . . . hope you find
a way to forgive yourself; if

it’s up to me, her thirty
year man, this

mother of our two
girls, my only

love, I’d let by
gones be bygones. Imagine this

boy, son to the sheriff’s best
buddy, whose truck tires caught a foot

of air careening down a county
road where a Toyota

creeped beyond a stop
sign, retreads

cracking rocks underneath. Faces
sudden and too

close, sharp and crumpled, not
what you meant that blue

sky day on that oiled
gravel, clear of limbs and deer

dumb looks. Oh my
brother, seated above your brake

pedal afterthought, it could’ve been any
of us. Remember the thrill

of flight. Maybe I’ll write
again. Maybe I won’t.

Mischelle Anthony’s work has appeared lately in Notch, Autofocus, Hood of Bone Review, The North (UK), Cimarron Review, and Little Patuxent Review, and in her chapbook, [Line] (Foothills Press). Raised in Oklahoma, she lives and works in northeast Pennsylvania.

Greg Piko

Emeralds and Sapphires

In 1932, German aviators, Hans Bertram and Adolf Klausmann, became stranded on Australia’s remote Kimberley coast. Bertram’s diary records that after forty days they were weak and awaiting death. The rugged walls of this stone overhang provide shelter, give sanctuary, deliver us from evil. They protect us with the grace of a vaulted nave or a marble apse beneath a golden dome. Outside, pools of water lie motionless in natural depressions that formed in the sandstone terrace before Christ was born. Rising brilliant orange in the afternoon sunshine, rough-hewn blocks stacked atop one another appear fragile and timeless. Crisp white ribbons of water cascade down the cliff, splashing carelessly onto the lowest ledge where a saltwater crocodile rests beside a sea sparkling with emeralds and sapphires. We’ve watched the sun circle north in the sky. We’ve seen unfamiliar stars shine through the addled branches of a tree whose bloated trunk has room enough for a wayside chapel. And yet, despite the abundance of birds, fish and creatures that scamper and leap, we never did learn how to live on this land. This world cannot be hurried. This world takes time to give up the secrets a stranger will need if he’s to prosper, rather than perish, though even a stranger can feel the warmth in the red sandy soil and the midday breeze. Even a stranger can recognise this as a land so rich, a land so full of life. God, we could not wish for a better place to die.

Gregory Piko lives in Australia. His writing has appeared in Westerly, Meniscus, StylusLit, Authora Australis, the Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, Poetry for the Planet, Poetry d’Amour, The Canberra Times and The Australian Poetry Anthology among other places. Please visit www.gregorypiko.com.

Sean Patrick

sonnet for neology

As sweet as sugar yet to be refined,
the demeraran joys of writing sit
upon a page with spaces undefined,
that tastes a tongue without consuming it.
A word’s a wild thing, without a bond;
and those proscribing methods of their use
have perpetrated an ignoble con;
if understood, one’s language may be loose.
Yet gryllic chirps may greet incomprehension
and rheodesmic knots of verse may slip
when tightening on traps of mere pretension;
a word must hold a meaning in its grip.
An utterance is an elusive thing:
neologize with care, lest crickets sing.

Sean Patrick is a scientist and sonnet aficionado. Their work has appeared in Grand Little Things, Blue Unicorn, Lavender Lime Literary, Corporeal, Verum Literary, the Blydyn Square Review, Empyrean Literary, and Consilience. Their sonnet collection “Love, Death, and Other Surprises” is available via online booksellers.

Ken Poyner

Strategy

Clowns seen recently have been dressed more ruggedly. The balloon pants fit more closely, ties are pulled shorter, shoes have shrunk to fit. They move, as well, more heel to toe and less side to side. In collection they show more organization, appearing less like a casual roll of balls. A few citizens have observed fully prepared clowns forego a guerilla performance. It has our most studious clown-watchers perplexed. Is it a natural development, or are they, together, plotting yet un-felt clownery against us? We are prepared to thwart ordinary performance, but are we equal to the infusion of order?

Ken Poyner has ten available collections of poetry, flash fiction and micro-fiction, the latest “Science Is Not Enough”, speculative poetry. He has suffered ten Pushcart nominations without a win, and has taught on an NEA Poets in the Schools grant. He spent 33 years herding computers.