Legalese     

Too early in autumn for leaves to turn,
and boats are still on mum harbor waters.
I feel the warmth of an unencumbered sun
as it massages my back and shoulder blades.

Here at the waterfront retaining wall
that bends and curves its way from the head
of bustling Fisherman’s Wharf,
general contentment rules the day.

From the railing I scan down a few yards
to the beach where a little boy, all alone,
is building a mound from wet sand.
With every handful he shapes and pats
his private little Mount Everest.

But his cause is lost, for the law of erosion
is absolute. And as if to demonstrate
the veracity of this law, the tide
continues to build, rising with every
incoming wavelet. Those wavelets
wash the mound away at a faster pace
than the boy can replenish it.
And so he gives up in defeat,
walking away dejectedly.

A hippie guitar player blissfully strums
and sings to the pleasure of passersby.

Then along comes the spunky Park Ranger
all decked out in an official uniform.
He extends his hand in mock friendship
mandating that the musician move on.

Meanwhile a ways down the stone seawall
a harmonica player carries on uncontested.
He bums a cigarette from a skateboarder
then continues blowing his harp, confident
no law could make him trim his scraggly beard.

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry and interviews have appeared in literary journals internationally, including Nimrod, Florida English Journal, Cream City Review, Mandala Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Boston Poetry Magazine. He has published a travel book, Best Choices In Northern California, and Time Lines, a book of poems.

Walden, Brookside Apartments, Jackson Street

Love your sooty, sullied hearth. It is your own.

Love the copper ash sighing in the rubbish bin.

Love the raindrops winking in your empty pane, tracing the dying geranium’s tallow arms.

Love the hunchback hippie-nun in 3B, who swears she taught Hemingway the art of drinking.

Love the spirit of the madwoman in your cupboard, whetting her lone candle stub with secrets whispered in the rain.

Love the damp cracks in your ceiling, through which you’ll rise to meet the goddess of your choosing.

Love the leaping kettle’s humming in your veins. It is your own.

Corfu

Distant mountains
lie barren and stony,
still as the dead.

Closer to the eye,
towering rock cliffs
come alive
with soaring peregrine falcons.

Among the almond and walnut trees,
lungs inhale and appreciate
air that sweeps in from the ocean,
salty and sharp.

Fresh water’s not forgotten here.
It spurts from red and gray rocks,
clear and clean,
with no instructions bar sipping.

Myrtle grows thick and wild,
its flowers like spiders of snow.
A strawberry bush
overflows with fruit
and a battalion of
a two-tailed pasha butterflies.

But the olive tree is king,
five centuries old in some places
and bent and arthritic to prove it.
Resilience, fertility and regeneration,
gnarled and twisted like a Van Gogh painting –
such is the pitted, ungainly trunk of life.

The sand dunes are my true asylum.
Salt marshes on one side,
lapping Mediterranean waves on the other.
I stroll between acres of creaking rustling bamboo
and foaming whitecaps.
A minor event
as cures often are to other people.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Evening Street Review, and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East, and Midwest Quarterly.

Monument Valley

Heading south on 191
Cars slip away like magic
As we head closer to the reservation
As if a 40 percent poverty rate might
Stick to the skin like a bad rash
Instead of an opportunity to serve
Another point of view

Purple sage, rich red sand, black
Apache tears under vast white clouds
Dropped onto an eggshell blue sky,
Cracked backdrop of spiritual enlightenment
Crass commercialism and cinematic dreams
John Wayne’s ghost battling with
A simpler way of life

Raised in Chicago and residing in Nashville, Doug Hoekstra’s short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.  He has two book-length collections to his name The Tenth Inning (2015) and  Bothering the Coffee Drinkers (2007 Independent Publisher Award finalist) and as a singer-songwriter, released eight CDS on U.S. and European labels, touring extensively throughout the US and Europe In support.    https://doughoekstra.wordpress.com/

Chickenpox   (1962)

I found the bump
below my belly button,

sitting on the toilet,
petticoat encircling me
like a queen’s grand hoop skirt,
feet dangling above the floor,
an angel too new
to get off the ground.

I rubbed the red bump,
pressed it
like a mysterious button,
wondering if anything would happen.
Nothing happened.

I’ve long forgotten the fever
and the countless bumps
that came out like twilight stars
all over my helpless skin.

I remember only that first bump,
one red blossom
in a field of smooth, white,
little girl skin,

and I remember innocence,
long before pubic hair,
long before sex,

life still white,
everything white,
except that single
red bump.

Kathryn de Leon has been writing poetry off and on since she was about nine years old. She lived most of her life in Los Angeles, but is now residing in England due to a life-long love of the Beatles. She’s had poems published in several small literary magazines.

Kaja Lucas is a Maryland-based poet currently representing Baltimore as a 2018 Youth Poet Ambassador. Currently in high school, she has been featured in her school’s literary magazine, and works closely as an editor. She loves sunsets and black tea.

Incautious Reverie

She was cautious, so wary,
she hid her feelings from everyone,
including herself, as tarnished images
that could only be revealed once
a cyanide solution was applied.
What was revealed was a photograph
of a dream where voices were heard
but there was no one there to speak.
Was a shadow of a spirit that hid
behind objects the way rocks hide
in a landscape of stones mined from
a nightmare that has no beginning
and no end. Hiding reveals nothing,
she thought, roots you to a ground
that refuses to be as solid as the roots
that seek to find purchase there.
Unbalanced as she was nothing is
reveled to her like images in a developing
tray. Remove them too soon and too little
is exposed, too late, and all the details
become fixed in the wrong places, become
landscapes with no horizons. Still,
she continues to bury what she needs most,
mornings after dreaming, the day becomes
the night she was afraid to focus on,
a reverse image on a negative that mirrors
what is missing in her life. Reaching out
to hold something, anything at all, is futile,
the fears she sought to hide have claimed her.

Alan Catlin is the author of Blue Velvet, winner of the 2017 Slipstream Chapbook Competition. His full length book Wild beauty will be published in 2018 by Future Cycle Press.

Hear like a Stone

Hear, like a stone,
as the Amtrak rattles
its brittle commute
back to your home.

Your fate is as clear
as vapor wriggling
from the lips of
your dead saints.

The millstones grind
your thoughts until
they falter like
devious old men.

Sunset is red-gold
on the rails, astral
fortune for ephemera
like you. Then,

you punch Sicily
into your smartphone,
hoping someone answers
your granite ears.

–after Rimbaud, “Entends Comme Brame”

David Anthony Sam lives in Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda. Sam has four collections, and his chapbook, Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson, won the 2016 Grand Prize in GFT Press’s Chapbook Contest. In 2017, he began serving as GFT Poetry Editor. www.davidanthonysam.com