Issue #1

Sarah Henry

The Poet of the Future

My brother’s eyes
are clear green,
the shade of a Perrier
bottle in candlelight.

He says, “Pierre water.”
It’s his own invention.
My brother is the poet
of the future.

My weak eyes
fade to hazel—
the color of muddy
water with algae
floating on the top.

“Trees and bushies and
shrubs” ring his yard.
That’s what he says.

It’s totally impossible
to fly a plane
or parallel park
without depth perception.
I’ll take a train and
park at the mall.

Complications of ophthalmology
are “out of tune-ish”
to the poet of the future.

Now he’s offering
drinks and “swillage,”
as in, “Swillage, anyone?
Cheese and crackers!”

I’ve got glasses and
he’s got a dictionary
he never uses.

Sarah Henry studied with two U.S. Poet Laureates at the University of Virginia. Today she lives near Pittsburgh. Sarah’s poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Poetry Review and The Loyalhanna Review and many other publications, including Soundings East, The Hollins Critic, Circus, The Camel Saloon, Indiana Voice Journal and Whatever Our Souls. CheapPop and Donut Factory featured her humorous prose. Humor is very important to her.

James Croal Jackson

Stepdad Thanksgiving

By the first scoop
of potatoes
                   you have cut
half your head open.

Jump to the cobweb
by the pumpkin pie.
           Spoon the spiders
out.

Super-creeper eggs
that hatch for everything
                 sit at the head
of the table.

Our Bodies Connected

locomotive

engines

steam whistle

caboose & freight

such carried

weight

steel-tracked

sigh & gasp &

moan

beneath

moon

beneath

morning

Transient

I need new faces
clothes drawers
opening
closing

I used to find
spacious greens
county lines
my hometown

I wandered
through the smells
of mom’s scrambled eggs

faucet running
disposal clogged
with garlic

understand
I want to be
a bullet train
memory

I’ll tell my future grandkids
stop moving
opposite
of me

James Croal Jackson is the author of The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Rust + Moth, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He edits The Mantle and is a former winner of the William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest. Find him in Columbus, Ohio or at jimjakk.com.

Richard King Perkins II

Written in Skulls

You’re killing me with your near truths
as I ride a scavenger raft

beneath floral boughs and harvest drapery.

If you believe what you’re saying,
you’ll tell me a more complete story

written in skulls and splintered ruins.

For some reason,
when I see a movement out the window

I still expect to see you coming home

carrying creatures you found
along a sea-meets-jungle shore.

You’re expecting
the same occurrence in reverse;

for me to abandon my driftwood journey
and find you twirling in a backyard garden

for no good reason—

hovering above thistle and thorns,
waiting for me to admit

that you don’t defy gravity

it’s just something you choose to ignore.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

William Doreski

Belmont Noir

Suburban dusk obscures detail.
Joggers dimple the path around
the reservoir. They toughen
their faces to hide the empathy
that requires a friendly nod.

Being old and out-of-town,
I move too slowly to matter.
Unobserved, I catch the gloom
in my hands and knead it like clay,
knead and sculpt it into figures

that I sprinkle in the grass
to hex that local arrogance.
Earlier in a room of strangers
I rose and spoke and felt myself
detach in the shyest tones,

although I rendered myself
loud enough to hear in the back
where someone awoke with a start.
Later I accepted a cookie
and bottled water, rather

like a horse after losing a race.
Now as one famous distance
piles over another I slot
my hands in my pockets,
descend the steps by the pump house,

and slink away under the trees.
Too dark now for art to cling
to the soft part of the conscience.
The joggers swerve homeward,
having tired themselves enough

to avoid sex with their spouses.
The underground reservoir sighs
molten little sighs no sinner
can hear. The water supply’s safe
for now, but surely it’s plotting.

First Marriage

When cockroaches shouldered us
from our top-floor apartment
and herded us to the harbor
and invited us to jump in
and drown, you laughed and shook me
back to sanity. Your earrings,
dashes of gold and pearl,
dangled like forbidden fruit.
Your makeup smeared like abstract
expressionism, the workday
shining through the dusty window.

That was the year of the stolen
cookware, of fiery footsteps
in the Granary Burial Ground.
One day the buses stopped running
and gangs stabbed homeless men sleeping
on the Common. The roaches
weren’t wholly creatures of dream.
Sometimes as I developed prints
in my makeshift darkroom they stomped
into the chemical baths and swam
with cheerful strokes, bathing themselves
in toxins that would fell a horse.
You hated their ghostly spoor
and despised me for failing to pluck
with tweezers every last one
and flushing them into the sewers.

Meanwhile at my office job
the anger stuck to the ceiling
like a smear from a food fight.
No one else noticed, but sighs
precipitated little rainstorms,
and when I went home at dusk
the cockroaches would applaud.
Then grisly with the morning’s rouge
you greeted me with tiny sounds
metallic enough to bleed me
of everything that makes a man.

William Doreski is a Professor of English at Keene State College whose work has been published in various electronic and print journals and in several collections, most recently The Suburbs of Atlantis (AA Press, 2013).

Thomas Zimmerman

Magpie

I drink a strong, delicious beer called Doom.
It’s just my nature. Made small-talk today
with a pretty neighbor. A bird had pooped
on the siding under the eaves at the front
of her house. “Strange,” she said. And I: “Well, I
don’t think most birds have sphincters.” Brilliant. I’m
too numb to call on ancient Greece for help
as Mandelstam so sufferingly does,
or gauze eroticism in Impressionistic
mist like poor lust-torn Verlaine. God love
them both. No, I’m a walking hairy bag
of water. A magpie, I must pilfer from
the richer. “You’ve been warned,” an old man says
to me in a dream. We’re under a roof
in a thunderstorm. “Tell me a story, or turn back.”

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He also edits The Big Windows Review. Tom’s website: https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com

Ian Stuart

Sea cave

I like poetry which is challenging without being pretentious, popular without being trite – and that’s the kind of poetry I try to write. I live with my wife, two cats and one dog in a small burrow just outside the city walls of York.

Kevin Casey

Flycatcher in a Three-Bay Barn

The kindly reaper has rolled aside the door,
wheels rumbling along its rusted track.

He waits, wiping his brow with a kerchief,
the setting sun showing the way behind him.

But stubborn and afraid, the barn-trapped bird
flies from window to window along the barn’s

north wall, struggling and thrashing
in the cool darkness, whisking hay dust

from the panes in its panic, the blue sky beyond
more clear from this stirring, but no closer.

Kevin Casey is the author of And Waking… (Bottom Dog Press, 2016), and American Lotus (Glass Lyre Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Kithara Prize. His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column ‘American Life in Poetry.’ For more, visit andwaking.com

Gale Acuff

Odds

Be Ye Therefore Perfect

Blink

Day One

Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Borrowed Solace, Dodging the Rain, and Twyckenham Notes, among others.

Patrick Deeley

Slimmage

I never got around to gathering
the words up, those
oddball words funny-sounding
on my tongue – ‘muggins’

come to mimic its own simpleton;
‘froufrou’ the rustle
of a ballroom gown; ‘mouldy warp’
the old-named mole;

but one word at least, lifted
from a lost lexicon, makes it back:
‘slimmage’, born beloved
of the rain, first coinage I drew

out of living – though
the sensation he suffered: salt sting,
heat muddle, passed
beyond my telling as he shrank

in my palm until little more
than a gob of milk curdle;
nor could I sympathize with his
predicament, only set him

down to graze on a lettuce leaf
after he had slipped
through a crack in the kitchen door,
only guess his slow progress

by the dawn-lit glister he left
along a stone floor,
and the place where I housed him –
a matchbox – escaped from.

The Antiquary’s Catalogue

This an original black buckram with red and gilt lozenge
on upper board, this with chipped spine, this with spine
mellowed, the joints of this a little rubbed, this unnumbered
in a flipcase, this unbound, this in white pigskin, this
in half-speckled calf, this attacked by ‘worms, rats or fungus’,
this with sketches mounted at large, this with foxing
in the text, this a near fine scarce complete run of issues.

Patrick Deeley is from Galway, in the west of Ireland. He has published six collections of poems with Dedalus Press, the latest being ‘Groundswell: New and Selected’. His critically acclaimed memoir, ‘The Hurley Maker’s Son’, appeared from Transworld in 2016.

Susan L. Leary

The Poem

Tomorrow you will be getting married,
and if you love this person, I imagine it will be something of the joy
I find in reading that one poem—
and forgetting it’s mine,
believing, rather, that someone, someone I
can never know, sent this poem to me
as a handwritten note,
because those words, I need
to receive them without that self-consciousness,
without comparison to the original,
and even though it’s a sad poem—as being young
was hard for you—
there is something in experiencing that poem
exactly as it is,
as I could only have wished to think it, without effort
or concentration, like an epiphany
except that no part feels, contrastingly, new,
because there is a kind of innocence
in misremembering,
in having no recollection of what happens
afterwards, no faint notion
that perhaps, this time, the feeling might be sustained,
as there is only thrilling delight in knowing
this poem exists at all,
yes, I think that is love—before I realize it’s mine,
and then everything is ruined.

Susan L. Leary is a Lecturer in English Composition at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL. Her most recent creative work appears or is forthcoming in Clear Poetry, Steel Toe Review, The Copperfield Review, Antiphon, Gyroscope Review, Dying Dahlia Review, The Big Windows Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere.