Sunday Afternoon

Stadium seats
grumble
in their bolts
like old men
fishing a lake
when the fish
don’t bite,
when the game
is away.

Empty seats fold
against themselves
like forearms crossed
against their chests
expecting a big catch
where silence and water
exist in reflection,
and the winning
touchdown replays
in memories.

Diane Webster’s work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, Verdad, and other literary magazines. She had micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022 and 2023 and was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022.

Coleridge on Scafell

He speaks his mind
in a Devonshire accent,
leaves home on a Sunday
morning for nine days
to walk around the Lake District.
He disregards the weather,
has no professional guide,
his thoughts high
on fresh air,
freedom and adventure.
He sees the wild, green panorama,
a sunset viewed from a sheepfold
with dreams for company.
A letter written on Scafell,
bruised ink on paper,
the thundery forecast
in a life,
with those clouds
that came from the sea.

Byron Beynon coordinated Wales’s contribution to the anthology Fifty Strong (Heinemann). Collections include The Echoing Coastline (Agenda) and Where Shadows Stir (The Seventh Quarry Press), which was launched in February 2023 at the birthplace of Dylan Thomas.

Sunday, from a Further Garden

I wake to a morning without dread.
The sky’s thrown off its sodden gray coat.

Pain my hips gave me for weeks is gone.
For once, my falsehoods don’t shackle me to shame.

I indulge the quiet of these hours.
Pretend phones may still be left off the hook.

Monarchs hover flowers I thought I’d let die.
I have no intention to buy trite things online.

Today I’m what sails seek in soft tradewinds.
A pretty neighbor waves to me, dawnlight in her hair.

I am not jealous of fame or beautiful eyes.
Grief took an overdue holiday, or fell asleep.

My neighbors have no goods worth coveting.
At dusk, I’ll see myself approaching home in a dark window.

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.

After a Japanese Festival

_____“and so one should know how to address the moon.”
_____–Czeslaw Milosz

I went to the city officials for a permit,
but the police came to check us out anyway.
We gathered in a deep park darkness,
my grad students, their mates, children,
even one mother, to share moon poems, lore,
songs around a bonfire to honor
a ritual practiced in Japan. We sang
the childhood song, “I see the moon
and the moon sees me,” made the mother cry,
she orphaned young, She had almost forgotten
how her father held her, sang this song to her.
Nearby stood my huge and bulky
Dobsonian telescope with its big mirror
encased in a sturdy cardboard tube,
developed by a priest to provide
the best sky watching for those
of meager means as well as those
wedded to poverty by choice.
We saw the moon’s sun-washed side
with its pockmarks and gray dust.
It was a beautiful night to gather
under heaven’s wonders and recite
and sing together of the many,
many bright things we had almost
forgotten, barely understand and
rarely think to celebrate.

Carol Hamilton taught 2^nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana, and Oklahoma, was a medical translator and storyteller. She was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published and received various awards for 19 books and chapbooks of poetry, children’s novels, and legends.

Sean Howard is the author of six collections of poetry in Canada, most recently Trinity: Tribute Sequences for Robert Graves (Gaspereau Press, 2022) and Unrecovered: 9/11 Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2021). His poetry has been widely published in Canada, the US, UK, and elsewhere, and featured in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2017).

Fragments 1

Overtures – a rumour. Darkened.
Wide-angled lens exposed purlieus.
‘Ministers need to take heads out of sand.’
Abstemious craws, promising landscapes.

Fragments 2

Bamboozled foothold, nonplussed hedgehog.
Detail of a second – close-up.
‘Move patients to hotel to free up beds…’
Skid eyes, as though bemused.

Fragments 3

Croon, it’s viable – don’t blub.
Slide trays keep record.
“Critical incident declared.”
Young‘uns edge in family mirror.

Fragments 4

Peach elflock on bather.
How inimitable this lustre?
“…scheme due to begin within weeks…”
Peppy colour, anomie is genial.

Fragments 5

Morass, gloaming slugs.
Pinkies loading film.
“Declared victory yesterday.”
A braggart’s overshadowing tower.

In 1998, Christopher Barnes won a Northern Arts writers award. In July 2000 he read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology Titles Are Bitches. Christmas 2001 he debuted at Newcastle’s famous Morden Tower doing a reading of poems. Each year he read for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and partook in workshops. 2005 saw the publication of his collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh.

Fishing Trip

I suppose I could make a comparison between myself, age ten, seated on the endgate of an old pickup truck, my feet wriggling beneath me while my father explains that he and my mother are getting a divorce, and the carp I saw moments later, wriggling on a muddy, desolate mound, the lake around it having receded, leaving it with nowhere, and no way, to go. Yes, I suppose I could do that, and in the end I will, because I’m a writer now, and that is something that writers do—we make comparisons, create metaphors, indulge in the many layers of life. But as I said, when all this happened I was only a boy, and unmoved by rhetorical flourishes, which was why, instead of crafting an analogy, I performed a deliberate act: I stepped into the lake, trudged over to the fish, grasped it with my bare hands, placed it into the water, released my hold upon its slimy scales, and allowed it to swim away—because on that day, only one of us had a chance to return to a world in which we knew how to survive.

Wolfgang Wright is the author of the comic novel Me and Gepe and various short works scattered across the ether. He doesn’t tolerate gluten so well, quite enjoys watching British panel shows, and devotes a little time each day to contemplating the Tao. He lives in North Dakota.

Herman Melville in Hell

He’d been there before as
a port of call, all the natives
dressed in missionary suits,
descendants of cannibals
who made their way North in
long boats with oars carved
from whale bones or so dream
fathers said around the pot
belly stoves smoking their long
stem pipes stuffed with aromatic
blends of hemp, dried tobaccos
soaked in cactus juices and left
out in the sun to bake the resins
right into their brains insuring
that the stories they told were
as vivid as the sunsets over
tall ships, their empty riggings
manned by spirits of drowned
sailors lost at sea.

Alan Catlin has several new books out in the past year including, Exterminating Angels, a full-length book by Kelsay Books channeling Noir and art movies. His How Will the Heart Endure, a labor of love about the life and art of Diane Arbus, was just released by Kelsay Books. His long-lost book Altered States, a cross country trip of a United States of the mind, will be out in 2023 from Cyberwit.