Left Fourth Finger                                                                

When I am working.
When I prepare and eat a meal.
When I unwrap and open packages.
When I use my hands
to help express my heartfelt spoken thoughts.
When I move heavy boxes.
When I get dressed and tie my shoes.

At these times I see my wedding ring,
securely placed on my left fourth finger,
reflecting the light and shadows of my hand,
placed over veins that enter my core.
I see this jewelry symbol of caring,
gently greeting open eyes
in an ancient universal language
that has no need for words.

I can hear our vows
symbolically melded
into a shining precious metal circle.
A circle that whispers
within a diameter of less than an inch.
That I am not alone.
That I share the present.
That I share an unwritten book
of remembered life stories.
That we touch in the middle of the night.

End Roll

A boy, 
Stained red and
Bruised blue, 
Dreams a 
Happy Dream
Where he has a happy life, 
Reliving how
Blood got on his
Hands.
Monkeys,
A birthday cake,
Faith,
Dragons,
Jealousy,
Alcohol,
And a lack of a
Mother’s love.

The credits never stop rolling.
The credits never stop rolling..
The credits never stop rolling…

Alexandra Dark is an undergraduate of the University of New Mexico who has worked on the staff of Blue Mesa Review. Her work was published in Outrageous Fortune and will be published in The Academy of the Heart and Mind. Her favorite color is purple, and she loves oddities.

Game Room Prize

Soft hands used to mean status.
No need to work
fine, delicate skin.

I shook the hand of a man
possibly a boy
with hands soft
doughy
not from lack of work but the
inability to do it.

It made me think of the
tickets, red and perforated (like
the kind you get at the game
rooms playing skee-ball or
shooting hoops).

It made me think of the games
I played to win a stuffed raccoon
(doesn’t even
look real to me)
and how much it seemed to
mean at the time.

Not once did I ever think what
it would be like to have hands
that can’t do anything. I think
that now as I watch the back of the
boy’s (man’s) head while
he nods it to a
country-western song
in the mid-afternoon sun.

LB Sedlacek is an award-winning writer and poet. Her latest poetry book is Unresponsive Sky, published by Purple Unicorn Media. Her latest short stories book is The Renovator & Motor Addiction, published by Alien Buddha Press. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize, both in poetry. Her mystery book, The Glass River, was nominated for the Thomas Wolfe memorial prize. She also enjoys swimming and reading.

Flutterings

On the ground
aspen leaf shadows
flutter a butterfly
kicking free
from its chrysalis
to fly in swallowtail
black and yellow colors –
an aspen leaf
in October.

Diane Webster’s work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Verdad, and other literary magazines. She had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023, and 2024. One of Diane’s poems was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022. Diane retired in 2022 after 40 years in the newspaper industry.

This Much Is Mine

She appears at the gate
to my apartment building
one night. Round
yellow eyes glinting
in the streetlight,
two little lanterns
of curiosity and longing.
She slides her tiny body
along the bars of the gate
and I kneel down
reach out my hand
and she meets it
with the top of her head
closes her eyes
and begins to purr.

Another night
I round the corner
and she comes
mewling sweetly
up the street. We sit
together on the stoop
and I stroke her gray
and white vibrating neck,
and she falls asleep in my lap.
Listen
to the steady magic motor
in her throat.

I bring her upstairs
and she sniffs every
corner and crevice and surface
and then she hops
up on the bed
and kneads my belly
and closes her eyes and when
she slowly opens them again
through the narrow
slits they glow
mine, mine, mine.

She drinks from her blue bowl
in the kitchen. She spreads
a forepaw to lick
the crevices between
all five toes
and all around them,
then places it on the floor
and lifts the other paw.
From the back the chair
she licks the top
of my head as I read.
Her whiskers twitch with dreams.
It snows a thick
layer on the fire escape
she dips her paw in it
then shakes it wildly,
the cold white fluff flying.
She is lit from inside.

My breakfast crumbs fall
and she puts her nose
to the floor to inspect them,
her tiny head dipping down
and up and down.

She wreathes her body
in circles around my shins,
and then she runs
to the bed
and rolls around
in the pile of freshly
laundered towels.
When I stroke her
she is electric
and the sound she makes is electric
as she stretches and contracts.
She grows fatter every day
and sleeps wrapped
tightly around herself.
She sits in the sun
on the windowsill
watches the leaves
blow around below.
She chatters
re eh et et eh at birds.
She sees me and I
blink back.

Wende Crow’s poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, LIT, New Haven Review, Inquisitive Eater, and Hartskill Review, among other journals. She received her MFA from the New School and teaches poetry for the International Writer’s Institute in Amsterdam. 

Mirrored Moon

The waning moon
reflects in a
puddle left behind
by the all-day rain …

its valleys &
seas so clear
in the chilled waters

Poet-translator Lorraine Caputo’s works appear in over 400 journals on six continents; and 23 collections of poetry – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023). She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.

Death Wish

He was dead as a doornail. And to think it could have been me. The icy wind whispered into my ears. My skin felt papery. And my tongue tasted the metallic blood splattered across my skirt, shining like the sequins on the Diwali outfit I had brought to wear. The thought of wearing the zari embroidered skirt had become like a noose tightening around my neck. I tried to run, but my legs refused, reminding me of the times Rahul cornered me in the bathroom of my house in Mumbai. He never did that when everyone was home. Diwali lights turned the streets into a wonderland and the women and the children walking on it turned into fairies with their shimmering clothes and tinkling laughter. I could never ever be like them. I could never ever even imagine it. This isn’t your street and neither is this your bazaar, they cried looking at me. The tainted kurtas of honesty and purity kept me awake at night. Sometimes, I would open the windows and cover the skies with my sequined, silvery white dupatta before crawling back to bed. Little Me knew it helped her dream better of a cozy, golden future far away from the gray, dirty reality that seemed to accumulate like festering secrets in the corners of her house. And one day it would all stop flowing, the blood and the hurt and the shame. Until then I will still feel the cold, white skull of a night upon me. Jaisi karni waisi bharni—what goes around comes around cries the vast green fields as I wait for him to never wake up from his death laced with ice-cold blood and lust. 

Roopa Raveendran Menon lives in Dubai, UAE. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has just been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @roopamenon01

Dead Flies and Other Sorrows

I read aloud a story in the newspaper about a café in Japan where all the employees have dementia–this leads to many mixed-up orders and laughter from customers and waitresses. I look at you and say, “Isn’t that wonderful! They’ve found some joy from that cruel disease?” You don’t answer; instead, you ask, “Shall I make tea?” It is one of the routines we still have. I nod and add, “I bought Bourbons. They’re in the cupboard.”

I don’t care for the chocolate biscuits, something about them reminds me of the Queen’s Guard, all upright and unvarying, but they’ve always been your favorite. When you used to do the shopping, you’d always buy a packet and some Garibaldi for me. You’d tease me, calling them ‘dead fly biscuits’ saying, “You know they call them that for a reason, and it’s not because of the squashed currants. It’s because of the way they taste!” And you’d smile and kiss me. I miss that.

I hear drawers slamming. I get up and try not to groan; you hate what you call my ‘old man noises.’ As I walk into the kitchen, the radio blasts ‘Women’s Hour,’ I ask Alexa to lower her volume. You snap, “I was listening to that. It was about living funerals. Where did you put that new lemon squeezer?” I must have a blank look on my face because you roll your eyes and say, “The Kennedys’ housewarming gift. I’m going to make lemonade.” I don’t have the heart to tell you our housewarming party was over twenty years ago, and the thing you are looking for is long gone like the Kennedy’s, him from a heart attack, her from breast cancer. So, I say, “I thought we were having tea? I don’t think we have enough lemons to make lemonade.” I don’t add that you never liked lemonade; you said it tasted of empty promises.

A program called ‘Songs that Won the War’ has started. Bing Crosby is singing, ‘Moonlight Becomes You,’ and you say, “Shall we dance?” And although I feel foolish, I take you in my arms. I imagine we look like the couple on our cuckoo clock as we waltz around the kitchen island, you with your blonde hair curling around your shoulders and me with my ruddy cheeks. 

I hear the front door open, and Francis, our daughter, calls out, “It’s me, Dad. I’ve got your shopping.” I quickly look around; it seems like we’ve just survived an earthquake. As I start stuffing everything back into the drawers, Francis walks in. “Oh, Dad, what on earth is going on?” I feel my face flush as I say, “It was your mother. She had a longing for lemonade,” I gesture to where you are swaying as you listen to Vera Lynn sing ‘I’ll be Seeing You.’

I can’t bear to look at Francis’s disappointed face, so I start unpacking the groceries and say, “Did you get Bourbons? You know they’re your mother’s favorite.” Francis goes to the fridge and takes out a bottle of lemonade. She pours two glasses, offers one to me and takes a long swallow from the other. Then she says gently, “Dad? Remember, Mum died ten years ago.”

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer. Some of the places her work has been published include Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and Janus Lit. Adele has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Finishing Line Press published her first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places.