Maps 

Growing up I loved maps—X Marks the spot,
dotted lines on old parchment leading 
through jungle, lagoon, and desert.

I loved boundaries, the distinguishing line
between two things. Much of life is like reading a map anyway— 

navigating between choices or deciphering music,
notes climbing steeply between sharps and flats.

New things are first like hieroglyphs. 
It takes the brain so long to right itself. To write itself. 

Growing up, I loved ships too.  
I wanted to feel the slow drift of water.
A ship’s slow crawl over the sea. 

Maybe this is why I can’t navigate the endless days, 
the nameless territories, no landmarks 
to show me where I am. 

No dotted lines like fire ants. No indelible X.
No words to carry me like a raft from this place. 
No one to tell me what I am searching for.  

I don’t think in countries, steps, or miles.  
I think in dotted lines, glass bottles. 
A black flag crisscrossed with skull and bones. 

Circuits without starlight. Paper sunrises. 
My fate flat and crinkled between my hands.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Cagibi, Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She is the author of three chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.

Amber Would Have Been Her Name

Memory

A burnt match of recognition
Funny what burns brightest and what
Just fades to ashes

An extended hand
Me reading you a short story by Toni Cade Bambara
Though I practically had it memorized

The things we find important enough to remember: Gorilla My Love
But not the time I wanted to try on maternity dresses at Ohrbach’s
Because you had me picturing motherhood

I don’t remember ever wanting to be anyone's mother
But did I ever tell you that?

You said if you ever had a daughter
You’d name her Amber

A sun-lit archive
Powerful; I can picture that

What burns brightest and what just
Turns to ashes? Me calling you the Lenny Bruce of produce
Because you said if strawberries were a drug
You’d be an addict

Ashes to ashes dust to dust:  what encompassed us
Is too ephemeral to recall

Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles, CA-based writer who has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Everything is Distant Now (Blue Horse Press), her debut poetry collection, is available on Amazon; In a Place of Dreams, her digital chapbook, can be found at www.jerryjazzmusician.com

Running from Shadows

No one really knows why she ran in the first place.
Too many shadows? Fights for dominance?
Who can read the maps of fear?

She ran.
Less Kerouac freedom on the road,
more Harjo stranded at the river.

She escaped into the forest, a fugitive
sheltering under pinecones and needles by day,
pilfering food at night.

Sometimes in the evening
she would call her kin
just to hear them, not to return.

Her reasons remain unknown.
Most people don’t ask. Most people
assume she has no thoughts, no reasons.

Is it a true story? It ended
when they brought the bull
up the hill and pulled
her back to pasture.

Jean Janicke lives in Washington, DC. She works as an economist and leadership coach and finds her creative outlet through poetry and dance. Her work has appeared in Paper Dragon, Passionfruit, and Green Ink Poetry.

Crow

Crow flies
Rows the scull into the sky
Wings of oar in brass locks squeak
Blades slip in silent splash
The river’s rippling stream
Rhythmic thrusts propel the hull
Momentum strides the steps
The spiral stairway of the air
Coxswain’s voice guides the pace
Coaxing speed out of grace
Higher crow calls
Higher crow calls
Higher

Ron Tobey is from north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He farms in West Virginia. He is an imagist poet, expressing experiences and moods in concrete descriptions in haiku, free verse storytelling, oral recorded poetry, and videopoetry. He also writes fiction. X @Turin54024117

Sky Blue Sky

clouds dabbed and streaked
across a too blue sky, so blue
we have no words for the color
but sky blue sky sky blue

watch it dissolve
to bands of bloody brilliance
at close of day
see it rise from darkness
above the emerging orb
of the morning sun

count the stars on moonlit nights
the heavens reflected
on shining leaves
and calm waters

October light like no other
a photographer’s dream
the sun strained through
harvest dust and cooler air

feel the white of a winter sky
cold come down from on high
to settle with a frosty sigh
on an eye-watering morning

smell the greening of Spring
fresh on an April breeze
sage and pine and dewed grass

reach to touch shimmering heat
of a Summer day

always above
and infinitely beyond.

Gregg Norman lives and writes in a lakeside cottage in Manitoba, Canada, with his wife and a small dog who runs the joint. His poetry has been placed in journals and literary magazines in Canada, USA, UK, Australia, Europe, and India. He was recently nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net award.

cover

if you don’t see the diagrams at night
you may not have the eyes of an owl
but blown paper can surely smack you in the face
and perhaps
spin you down
like a chloroformed rag.

it only takes a few seconds
and then you can lie under stone in watered geometry
and decompose as primate
or grow as fungi.

artwork is the gray smell of an urban day,
___________a haze that blunts the snap of crickets
as they cough in reedy fields.
smokestacks are screws placed in bone
to bridge a fracture site.
new births,
________ubiquitous as traffic signs,
will not go away.

stuck with pins and little flags,
evidence is everywhere:
you don’t need a lab coat to be a scientist.
altered dna laughs at you
and refuses to identify itself.

oxygen is a black and white tv

you can’t see the scum for looking

it is often this way with witnesses.

Offending Strangers

“Bastards stole my pickles!” shouts a man wearing a long, pea-green coat with a bright red scarf, wrapped cast-like around his left arm. He’s on the far side of the street, stomping through late-winter slush. “Mother told me to go to hell but wouldn’t drive me to Blockbusters.”

He must be talking to someone — maybe an acquaintance at the crowded bus stop on the corner — but he isn’t. Blockbusters closed two decades ago.

“You belong in lockup,” he rages, while I wonder how much brain damage or drug abuse it would take to make me seek the attention he demands.

People pass without raising their eyes from their phones, or their dogs, and steer clear as if moved by an invisible forcefield surrounding the shouting man.

“Bed restraints. Sedatives. Padded cells. Dopamine deprivation.” His eyes bulge, unshaven cheeks appear smeared with ash. Heading my way, he steps into traffic. A car honks and swerves around him.

“You’re a mongoose who eats soggy cake,” he says to one woman at the curb.

He raises his middle finger and screams at a man not far from me, “A scaly, grey potato bug is sexier than your pecker.”

Warnings flash in my head: do not react, do not make eye contact. He could easily erupt into physical violence. I consider turning and bolting, or kneeling to pretend I’m tying my shoe.

He shouts at the last person between him and me, “I smell arse on your breath.”

Everyone bears his insults with reserve and fortitude, by ignoring him or looking the other way. Some hold back laughter, while others shake their heads and walk with bolder steps.

At one arm’s length, he stops and stares. A fetid, sweaty stench oozes from his pores. I look straight ahead, as if I haven’t heard him or smelled his body funk, and hope he’ll go easy on me. Time slows. I keep walking; each step brings me closer to the inevitable.

His voice softens. “You’re okay though,” he says as if discovering a crispy apple in a dumpster of rotting produce.

I stumble at the shock of his words. A shudder rumbles through my chest and arms and reaches my fingertips. The injustice. The affront. No insult could have landed more harshly.

The lunatic stomps away while the “arse-breathed man” turns, brow furrowed, and glares at me, as if I’ve offended him.

Dave Gregory is a Canadian writer, a retired sailor, and a fiction co-editor with the Los Angeles-based Exposition Review. Please follow him on Twitter @CourtlandAvenue.

Ministry of Chairs

I was ten trying to carry the metal chair
that, folded, stood higher than my armpit
where my dad deftly tucked two on each side
to return to a roomful of guitars hung like sentries
above old textbooks and the empty space for the
chairs that had to be moved before and after each concert and show,
a repetition that challenged my youthful inattention.

He was a music teacher–a man of harmony and rhythm,
of pitch and measured rests and silences,
of spaces between the notes when we rode in the car
to Lovely’s Farm Market past Richard’s Run in fall’s half-light.

He rammed his shin’s side against the bottom bar
to straighten the row of chairs when I handed him one
then hurried back to tackle the next seemingly endless row
that had to be removed before I could shoot free throws again.

He played the upright with Mrs. Sanker to craft an operetta,
her big toe by the pedals while I swallowed gum.
He taught his choirs “What Do We Do with a Drunken Sailor”
and “Walk Like an Egyptian”. He kept stickered charts on the door,
inspirational messages by his desk, and posters of solfège syllables.

His metronome consistency marked by rehearsals and soundboards,
mics and risers, by the ritual ministry of chairs
so that some dad might come in on an evening after working
at the lumber yard by the river, sit, see his young son singing
and a sliver of light might crack through the old gym windows
above the bleachers and settle through the dust of this life
and a note of hope might echo within their old truck
as they head home past Todd’s Fork and into life’s backroads.
Each chair a different note in a lifesong of service.

Nathan Coates lives in Lebanon, Ohio with his family and spends his days helping high school students read and write. These are some of the first poems he has sent out into the world.