let’s dance until the roof caves in

sometimes
those old days come back to me
and I see them there
smiling and brittle and waving:

days that turned into long nights
that turned into sleep at dawn
all-the-while
drinking
and smoking
and writing
bad poetry,
spinning until the rubber came off the rims
burning until the soul gave out
until the heart beat its last
and deflated
like a thick balloon.

what a time it was

what a ride

I still do all that now
but in moderation:

the drinks are fewer each night
the smokes are cheaper
and the poems are better for the most part
but ever fewer than the drinks

and I’m in bed hours before dawn

hell,
I actually write in the mornings now.

what a time it is

what a ride:

more responsible
but
less romantic. oh well.

nobody wants to know those kinds of poets anyway
if they want to know any at all.

now I change the tires on the regular
and make sure that I wick the candle

and I do what I can for the old ticker
to make sure that at least I can dance until the roof caves in.

No Sonnet Saturday or When You Just Gotta

I forget to bring them with me today,
these sonnets where I find you every morning
fourteen lines of you spiraling
out among the weeds,
dodging dust bunnies in the dark.
So what does that mean for you
or me? The answers come so quickly
I forget to breathe between them.
Only this, this moment, this day
where each of your bracelets
circles ‘round my wrists,
forms the chain between us
to feel a quickened pulse
that says, soon.

Audrey Howitt lives and writes poetry in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Ms. Howitt has been published in: Roi Fainéant Press, Academy
of the Heart and Mind, Purely Lit: Poetry Anthology, Washington Square
Review, Panoply, Muddy River Poetry Review, Total Eclipse Poetry and
Prose, Chiaroscuro-Darkness and Light, dVerse Poets Anthology, With
Painted Words, Algebra of Owls, and Lost Towers Publications.

Self Portrait Without Me

Start with a D minor chord in December branches
__before light can find any sparrows. Let an owl
__blow dawn’s voice out its crooked beak
__as it drops from a tree, strikes an arc across stars.
Coyote’s nails click against asphalt. Done with the night
__coyotes trot back to a den. A garbage truck drums
__up the street. Every morning a garbage truck
__drums up the street. Smells like that linger and cling.
A lot has been hauled away. The beloved dead
__enter with D minor, come like junkies
__like thieves, like coyotes to take whatever they can.
__More lays erased under snow and ice. All these losses
Have left the air jewel clear. Every day I go away from the poem.
The next morning, like a winter sky, it is more empty and more full.

Ed Ruzicka’s third book of poems, Squalls, was released in March. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary, and many other literary publications. Ed, who is also the president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.

Green Leaves

Wind pushes the dried and crumbling remains of spring into streets.
Leaves them on lawns and porches, driveways.
Sometimes you are born with more trees than the rest.
Sometimes you plant your own and love them, letting them grow
Pushing them toward the sky by will and sweat.
Then, years later, enjoy the sight of the dry leaves
Filling the empty spaces on the grass.
And the sudden realization that a lifetime was spent in the pursuit of
Dry leaves
Which are blown from the yard and down the street.

Marc Janssen has been writing poems since around 1980. His verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast, Poetry Salzburg; also in his book November Reconsidered. Janssen coordinates the Salem Poetry Project and was a nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.

Mamma’s Kiss & Tell

you are invited to watch my undoing,
where you will hear stories about my
life and times, of my anger and resentment,
the shameless flirtations with random men.
you will know that during meals, i never sit
with the family because they morph into the
worst-case scenario that lives in my brain.
you will learn about afflictions that seem
permanent, that no one ever asks me
what it is like to be married because they
know i don’t consider myself so and only
see a slave, relegated to kitchen duty,
ready for their side stares and laughter.
they know me by a different name and
gather in hallways, whispering
‘simma down bitch’ so i hide my feelings
and offer cheerless congratulations for their
deadly stupidity and useless plans.
they erase me each day, and when they do,
i remember there is a serious thing i want
to do, which is exactly this: run alongside a
slow-moving, southbound train, get in and
be rocked to sleep in its empty hollows,
dreaming of flowers that grow in places
they aren’t supposed to.

Loukia Borrell is a first-generation American whose parents were born in Cyprus. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a journalism concentration, from Elon University. She is a former print reporter. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, Poetry Bus Magazine, Roi Faineant Press, One by Jacar Press, and elsewhere. 

To Paint Original Poems

I sit at a table of words
attempting to paint original poems
that might be remembered
for a mirrored moment
in someone’s life.

I leave my chair
and walk in pensive circles,
through pools of wet rainbow images,
splashing verbal colors in a room without walls,
an infinite room without closed doors.
The floor is over-crowded
with unlabeled museum exhibits of joy and pain.

I sit back down to continue writing.
Trying to weld iron images
that are firm, yet, untouchable.
Visual words that will float like dreams.
Deliberate words, enduring words
that will slowly step down
from the ladder leaning
on the open window of my closed eyes.

David Lipsitz has been writing poems for over fifty years. His poems have appeared in BIG WINDOWS REVIEW, CAPE ROCK, CHAFFIN JOURNAL, FROM THE DEPTHS, MAIN STREET RAG, UPPAGUS, WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW, and other literary publications. His chapbook, ILLUSIONS ON THE ROAD, was published by Bragdon Books. 

Spring River

Today, the snake of wind
found me counting my obsessions
on a bank near the river
that is not a river
but simply a confluence
of water and sky,
a simulacrum
of some ancient flowing.
That snake, with its white tongue
and delicate body,
fed on the gravity
I carried in my heart
until I too was a clear mirror,
a creature of uncertainty
losing its bearings
in the deep, violet rush
of light and petals.

Seth Jani is a poet, publisher and bartender in Seattle, WA. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ghost City Review, Rust+Moth, and Phantom Drift, among others. His most recent full-length collection, Field Music, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2023. Visit him at www.sethjani.com.

Listening to Astral Weeks & Emailing Russell Thorburn

& Van Morrison is wailing about the fragile dancer
& telling her
to spread her ballerina wings
for if she doesn’t, the wind, the wild air,
will simply whisk her away
where she will then become glued, like seal wax,
to the rippling olive-tinted water
wiggling just behind a factory where they bake soap
& sell it to hotel chains outside the city,
& so she’d be stolen down stream and written
into another’s love song, the ballerina.
& the strings on Ballerina tell us just a bit about a song,
especially that it is an unfixed shape, a dancer
on a trapeze wire & the I withdraws into beauty,
it has to surrender to it
because the trace of the shape of the ballerina
is liminal, it’s barely there,
& it’s so transient that it could fall into another’s
pocket, into another’s love ballades poem,

& so Morrison, right there in the studio, grabs it,
the song & not the ballerina
because she’s already gone, is just a trace
of herself as Levinas would say – she’s emanation –
& she’s just a little eyelash hair on my paper,
& so I email Russ just to tell him
I’ve found it right here, the eyelash, the emanation,
& I put it on this poem, for him.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. It was reviewed by Tipton Poetry Journal and Trampoline Magazine. Other collections include: Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022) and Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020). He has work in Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The MacGuffin.