Witching Hour Bliss

sometimes at 3am, I am awake.
I open the window and drink the night.
the cold air hits my lungs like ice,
but it feels good to feel
something that isn’t pain.
I let the night flood my body,
making me whimper,
and leaving me melancholy.
but it feels good to feel
something that is better than pain.
then I close the window,
drunk on the night.

Ashley Fernandes is an emerging Canadian writer based in the Toronto area who is currently working fervently on her first novel, Hummingbirds in the Night Sky. When she is not writing, she spends her days reading for inspiration or fantasizing about drinking hot chocolate in autumn weather.

Drunk, and trying to be quiet.

moving through the kitchen
like a boat in harbor,
drunk at 11pm
on wine, and a little beer afterward,
and trying your best
to be quiet. putting down bottles
by the backyard door
with a sound
like tanks
crushing houses in palestine.
then you turn
and knock a fork over. turn again
and pick it up. upstairs
someone turns over
in your bed
and snorts a sound
like cars crashing
and collapsing
mineshafts. you freeze. then move,
more freely now,
feeling a fool in your concern,
remembering
how heavily
she sleeps.

DS Maolalai has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

NGO

My group reinvented compassion.
We dispense it, with whatever
water, pills, fresh bandages, etc.
we have, on the blanket heaps,
torn tents, and cardboard homes
extending miles
from the broken cloverleaf to former country.
The vista has a dark sublimity.
If it were part of our culture
we would, while kneeling, ministering,
and seeing – too few – our comrades do the same,
remember saints in paintings,
and reflect: There was a hierarchy
that made propaganda
from a legend or a wish, then hired artists …
As it is, we think mostly about guns –
great survivors, always healthy –
and viruses that paint
the landscape in broad subtle swaths.
Like all of us, I spent my early years
killing. My rationale was broadcast
from the splintered towers on every skyline
to the pasteboard church of my former father.
When, on the shoulder
of the cracked road, I tend
dying youths who only killed for food,
I envy them. One is troubled
by a drone. “It isn’t ours,” I tell him,
“we don’t know whose it is.”
With his last breath he hails the Holy Ghost.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former to be reissued 2020 by Red Hen Press), and two collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals.

Heisenberg and Heidegger Homelettes

don’t save bandaged reminders of uncertain songs
and wail in the night over dry Mississippi oxbows
_____protecting engendered species under eroding banks
where they hover in harmonic minors like blues and lamentations

don’t wait for ships to sail lost strangers on a road less travailed
and all smoke and flakes of snowy ash floating downy windy
_____reddening sunsets like an uppercut grazing a bruised cheek
where ancient wounds forget stragglers who mean neither good nor harm

don’t count your blessed chickens pecking relentless paradiddles on gravel
and tin roofs with Englishmen in the noon day puncture of a sky less avid
_____enthralling forever arrows of outrageous importunities
where a dazed audience doesn’t know whether to laugh or crow

don’t you know little fool your trajectory has concealed your likely positions
and being becomes less available for psycho-concussive
_____tripping hammers against a true temple of everyone’s worship
where miracles abound like leaping lords and turtle dove love

don’t slow cook being as an abstraction derived from universal sproofs
and a mortar pure white in all its concavity sequestering powders
_____awaiting an anxious blow from above crushing will to powder
where humming sooths that abyss staring back at a stranger’s eyelids

__________________a stranglers eye
___________________________a strand                a

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worchester Review. His book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher.

Swimmer For Hire

I saw a woman I used to know
and when I knew her we were kids
on the swim team.  We used to
put Jell-O mix on lemons and limes
or sometimes if we didn’t have
Jell-O mix we’d use sugar … in-between
races at swim meets.  It was for
extra energy.  We used to carry the
Jell-O mix, the sugar in empty
Cool Whip containers.  This was
before energy drinks and bars and
huge jolts of caffeine in tiny
aluminum cans.  This was before
underwater radios or MP3 players
and underwater cameras.  We rode
our bikes to the pool or to the movies
parking them on the bike racks
outside.  Those bike racks are gone.
The movie theatre condemned.
The swim team disbanded.

I saw a woman I used to know.
I didn’t tell her that I don’t swim anymore.

LB Sedlacek is an award-winning poet and author with poetry and fiction appearing in many different journals and zines. Her latest poetry books are The Adventures of Stick People on Cars (Alien Buddha Press), The Architect of French Fries (Presa Press), and Words and Bones (Finishing Line Press.)  She is a former Poetry Editor for ESC! Magazine and also co-hosted the podcast for the small press, “Coffee House to Go,” for several years. She teaches poetry at local elementary and middle schools and publishes a free resource for poets, “The Poetry Market Ezine.” In her free time, LB enjoys swimming, reading, and taking guitar lessons. 

The Discrete Wife of Calamity
 
lives with four dogs. Bruno, Brutus, Bluto
and the Boy. The Boy is not a puppy. None
of her boy friends are young pups. Only
the painting of a blue and white mastiff
on the wall has dignity and wisdom. She’ll
build a fence when she leaves him. Invisible.
In ground. Electric. Like the chair that fried,
was it Sacco & Vanzetti? Yellow Mama.
Texas? Boston? Or the last woman put to death.
Here. Her car used to park in snowbanks. Icicles
Through the sun roof. The yellow convertible
never made it off blocks. Like her brown hair
yellowing with age. Pretty woman. The way her eyes
reflect the sound of rain. Her dogs surround
her essence of fulfillment. Madame. Madam
moseil, Paray vous? Down on the farm.
A pretty cup. Ewer. Olla. Sheep’s milk. Cheese.
She set her ass in the butter tub. Licking his
fingers. On her knees. His knees. Some
body’s knees. Oh, the slap of a blue black
bruise, the sting of his cheek on her palm.
That fine reproduction secretary he built
spins out its drawers, rolls back its top to tip her
inside. She locks herself in with some poet’s book.
Poet? Of butter, melting in her mouth.

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, and JAMA. Her recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

At the End

If something still remains of me, and wakes
when earth or fire slides the animal away,
what then?

Do I dwindle in a smaller, thinner air?
Do I keep my memory of skin
where the new light touches me like wind?

Will the sky be white
with objects that move gently
as a fall of snow or pages, pleasing me?

Will there be colors and a sun?
Small birds on straight, dark, blooming lines,
eyes leveled, staring outward?

Or will I simply fall—one of many
shrieking in the light that chars
the sinners dropping in a shriveled sky?

Will I find the old myths true: Angels, judgment,
a black pit—and for a few the marvelous
blue light that widens upward like a hand?

The believers rising as if shaken out of sleep
in the pulsing sands of Heaven,
the strange colors beating everywhere.

And none of it mine. No tool. No sign.
No hill of words that I could make or rake away
to level the mistake of disbelief.

Patricia Nelson is a former attorney who has worked with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a group of Neo Modernist poets. Her most recent book is Out of the Underworld, Poetic Matrix Press.