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Ben & Jerry’s

Someone told me
“Healing isn’t linear”
and I nodded
like I understood

But last night
I listened to a voicemail
from her
from November
just to hear
her voice say my name

And now
I’m back
at day one
with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s
and a hoodie
I should’ve burned
long ago

A Turkish writer & poet, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

Broken Rocks

The rock that broke from the moon
has its own glow that infiltrates
the bedroom, casting shadows.
It’s that kind of night.
We lay around until hunger strikes
and from the kitchen, a honey crisp
apple balanced on the round plate.
The best way to eat it is sliced
down to the core, this one
so sweet and fresh it’s slick
under the knife and longs to be tasted.
I share it with you, my improbable lover,
bending to me in the plate’s
reflection. Moons eclipsed from other nights
are in the curtains, interrupted by thoughts
of Eve. If her apple was a honey crisp
all can be forgiven, and Sin is the name
of the way we make love tonight.
It’s still a surprise, how easily I settle
into your rhythm as if you are the glow
and I the shadow rising to greet you.

Kristy Snedden is a trauma therapist and poet and artist whose work has been widely published online and in print. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and for Best of the Net. She creates poetry and art because it is the most fun she has ever had. www.kristysnedden.com

Insomnia

I was doing well in college, had myself
on a schedule:

_____up at 6
_____showered and breakfasted by 8
_____classes from noon to 6
_____dinner
_____study until 10pm
_____bed

Everything was working except for sleep.
I couldn’t sleep
I was reading Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters
_____by Salinger.
There wasn’t anything about that book that troubled me.

Usually reading in bed put me to sleep in five minutes.
No more.

I complained to my friend, George—
two years older than me,
the disgruntled son of a famous man.

George had the solution—brandy!
Sitting in his dorm room where booze
was strictly forbidden, George poured me
a huge snifter of golden hooch. By
midnight we’d finished his pint bottle.

Instead of sleep, we both felt the frisky sting of insobriety.

My insomnia doctor prescribed a journey
to Everybody’s, an afterhours joint down
by the railroad tracks in Laramie. We knocked

on the door at 2 AM and were greeted by
two swarthy gentlemen dressed in leather
jackets and smelling of weed. They gave
us the onceover. Evidently, we two white
college boys didn’t threaten them.

Everybody’s was aptly named: everyone
from white football coaches, black basket
ball players, Rhodes scholars, burnt out|
former students, and residents of the local
pokey on work-release were there.

George and I danced with some cowgirls,
their buckskin coats swirled in the dim light.
We sang, we drank more, we closed the place
and staggered into the rose-colored dawn at 6 AM.

It could be said that George’s cure was successful—
I passed out the second my head hit the pillow that morning.

_____My schedule was kaput.
_____I missed all my classes.
_____It took two weeks for me
_____to finally fall asleep
_____at a reasonable hour.

By then I was reading The Brothers Karamazov in bed,
a gentle sedative that ushered me into
the benign world of patricide and grand inquisitions,

and put me right to sleep.

Charlie Brice’s poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

Times Square with My Father

My mother ‘s face was alabaster white and heart shaped and, I imagine, irresistible to my father. They met in church. My father had somehow survived D-Day and what came after, the Battle of the Bulge, and eventually, the liberation of Paris. There was a sweet sadness to my father which must have emerged later, when their first child died, but when I look at pictures of my mother and father alone, just kids, dancing at their wedding reception, he in his handsome tux, she in white eyelet lace with long train trailing half the length of the small immigrant church where they married, I realize he may have been to war but was he prepared for  her? She called herself a brat, had made him wait two years before marrying, and that skin, unblemished, untouched by the sun. They say the generation before ours is the one we’re most curious about, because we cannot fathom what the world was before us. 

One night I had my father to myself in Times Square. I don’t remember why we were in town, though I’m sure it wasn’t for a play on Broadway. My father was not a man who went to the theatre. But on this night, as I walked beside him and tried to match his stride, careening off tourists, my head snapped upward to take in the Marlboro Man’s jutting jaw, and the Camel sign puffing white smoke into frigid air.

A woman wearing a belted black trench coat stepped in front of us. My father watched me stare at the back of her head. The woman stopped to speak to a panhandler. I had a view of fair skin, severe cheekbones, glistening dark brown hair, small nose, light down on her cheeks.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, meaning she was less than ten years older than me. My father elected to keep walking, calling over his shoulder that he’d meet me at Horn & Hardardt automat between 46^th & 47^th.

The woman handed the panhandler a ten-dollar bill and walked off. I wondered how my father looked at my mother that first time, measuring her height, the length of her stride, how they would fit together. No, I thought, they had met at the Italian Methodist church. He’d known women in Paris, desperately hungry, who’d nearly starved through the Occupation, women eager to show their gratitude to GI’s handing out cigarettes and chocolate. My father had waited for what he’d wanted. I watched my girl move up Broadway, her hair perfectly cut and swinging lightly, her heels clicking on the slick pavement.

Gary Percesepe is the author of twelve books, including Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Review one of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. Percesepe’s new poetry collection is titled The Girl of My Dream. He lives on Maui with his family.

Still Life with Yesterday

I collect time—
Sheets of paper made of time and sky and words.

The sky is made of the dead.
How there are no dead all time being simultaneous.

We are living and dead and words are ephemeral.
Paper is made of albino crows that fly away to dust.

My grandmother is dust.
Time moves as wings move as wind moves.

Wind rustles the pages of books.
Wind borrows the voice of cedar boughs.

Words cannot speak for themselves.
Cedar smells like joy.

How the sky is the convex surface of a river called earth.
How the earth is a speck of dust in the cosmos.

Time is the smell of popcorn and wet dog.
Time is the smell of coffee and sea spray.

Joy is the earth itself.
From up in the sky my grandmother sings.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred forty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her newest collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024). Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.

Trip Advisor

Here came the ocean sneaking back
after pulling out yesterday with no so longs
We will ignore its obvious infidelities
Sol the dehumidifier and Luna the water magnet
have worked together to create Thursday
and given the visiting eyes on the balcony
a glimpse of the cosmic flywheel  everyone
will then go down to breakfast reassured

***

To This Waiting

I brought a book  a moth at the window
coffee heated by red spirals
light wrapped inside a little twisted bulb
I brought patient expectation to a grid of tiles
spider head down as if six thirty
appliances assembled in rapt silence
the book so poignant its pages were tissues
in anticipation

***

Michelangelo Variation

If his figures awaited release from rock
then angels were probably already in the paint
It was just a matter of brushing them out of the bristles
and into the air above the apotheosis

***

Olympic

How to enter the water like passing through glass
without disturbing the surface a loving limitation
a perfected falling the simple parameters of height
and surface and how many twists between them
ending in tens and a kiss of no particular nationality

***

Texts

Writing is a hand  book hand  hand in hand
longhand taking hold of cursive like a rope
A book of hours in Carolingian Minuscule
testamentary evangelistic commemorative
calligraphy on skins indexing memories

Sudden Accelerations, 
or I Hate to Say This but …

The white-capsule, white-pink-and-black
box of Good & Plenty is 
no better or worse than the yellow-orange-
brown Reese’s butter cups wrapper.

In a circle of mint-green chairs 
each child, in turn, reads aloud 
from Around the Corner.
The book’s title seems a metaphor for fate, 
and the circle a circle of mortality.

Culture vulture that I am, I wonder 
if singer Pearl Bailey and actor Dorothy 
Dandridge knew each other. Google 
could tell, or a looker, listener
who was alive when they were alive.

In the dark of my celibate room, I rise 
and shine, thinking I moved far away
from the person I should have married,
and the person I wanted to marry moved 
far away from me.

Within these walls, Bill,
who was in lumber, passed away, and Carl,
a handwriting expert, settled. 
I wonder if either, or both, ever admired
the beauty of leopards.

The dark underbelly of humanity lies 
behind the sunny skies of filmmaker David 
Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive. 

One night, on a riverbank, it was still 
light outside, I rubbed red-green leaves 
from a poison ivy bush on my arms.
I wonder, have you ever bitten into tinfoil, 
say, from a gum wrapper? 

Dana was walking and fell through ice.
He got out of the freezing water, 
and to a phone booth and called his mother.
That happened after the night of Anselm
Hollo’s poetry reading. Hollo said,
“Anything can be a poem.” Dana, sitting 
next to me, said, quietly, “If it’s good.”

When musician John Coltrane did an album
with vocals, he chose Johnny Hartman, 
whose voice is as smooth as water poured
from a decanter into a glass,
and whose life was ill-fated, due to an excess
of alcohol, according to Wikipedia.

The sound of dice shaking in a cup, 
a sequence of soft clunks, is pleasant,
though I’ll be damned if I can recall
my hand shaking such a cup.

Have you ever stuck your fingers 
in a bowling ball,
or petted a mare’s mane, or been bitten 
on the back of a leg by a Wheaton
while mowing a lawn? 

Note money’s similarities: Abraham Lincoln 
on a five-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton
on a ten. Both names start with a and end 
with n; both men died from being shot by
pistols, Lincoln from behind in a theater; 
Hamilton in a duel on a promontory 
above a river.

Have you ever sat in a garden? I haven’t,
but I weed a small garden,
shaped like a shield curved 
on one side, straight on the other,
and, at the bottom, pointed. In my garden 
red roses, a stone throw a brown milk box. 

Weeding a garden is like writing a song
or a poem. The poet Stanley Kunitz,
in Provincetown, tended a garden. 
Its array of colors and blooms 
startled passersby.

I wish I could act as well as Barbara Payton,
the femme fatale in James Cagney’s film
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Google could tell me the name of glass
with diamond patterns in it,
that you can see yourself in,
like the two glass doors of a big brown 
cadenza I saw myself in,
when I was nearer a floor than I am.

Face the invisible mirror, I tell myself.
The person I should have married 
was blond and easy to get along with;
the person I wanted to marry 
was brunette and hard to get along with.
Boxing fan that I am, I remember Emile 
Griffith and Benny Paret. Griffith, years 
after their third, fatal match in the ring, 
said, “I couldn’t get along with myself.”

On the baseball diamond, shortstop
Luis Aparicio 
tosses the ball to Nellie Fox, 
who fires it to first 
to get the out that ends the game.

Peter Mladinic‘s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press.

fire hall

i.

the man and dog are silhouettes
black ghosts against cobalt
trekking the high thin line
of a reservoir horizon
boundary water between ceded ground
and inverted native soil

it’s an invented sky
free of crow and cloud
small trees
are instilled with imported birdsong

the man carries a walking stick
the dog is unleashed
stony banks
bleed afterbirth of snow
flushing into the creek below

power line derricks sprout
like giant weeds
like neo-totems that carry dominion
in this age of loss

the old man’s silhouette throws
a frail shadow
from his vantage he sees
an invisible distant place
like the moment before lightning flashes
like white-collar thievery
like a promise

the dog sniffs and runs and jumps
carefree and agile

what was once hunted
no longer cowers

ii.

the traffic hums on chiseled ground
scuffing through scattered a-frames and ranch homes
the sun was always restless
the sacred dna: out-numbered

drenched in the color of our willingness
tainting decay with flowers
memory: a sacrificed intelligence

iii.

the silhouette floats
disguised as a human being
he steadies along with his veteran’s limp
and his walking stick
the dog is as playful as the daylight allows

approaching the path below along the creek
the old man whistles a song with
a stolen melody
then pulls a small coin from his pocket

drowns lincoln like a stray seed
in an oily mud puddle
a hope that will never germinate

Dan Sicoli lives between two Great Lakes in New York State where he co-edits Slipstream. He will have a new poetry collection out from Ethel Press in 2026. Recently he’s had poems included in Abandoned Mine, BlazeVOX, Evening Street Review, Hellbender, Hobo Camp Review, Home Planet News, Loch Raven Review, Ranger, Rye Whiskey Review, and San Pedro River Review, among numerous others. On weekends he beats on an old Gibson in a local garage rock band. <www.pw.org/directory/writers/dan_sicoli>

The Secrets They Whisper

I catch the flinch in your eyes.
Do you think I chose to live like this?
I once owned a bed, a sofa, and a kitchen table.
Hope sat beside me in the mornings, warm in the steam of my coffee.
My hands held dreams.
My hands cradled children.
Then, the ground crumbled under me.

If you see a woman huddled on the street, take another look.
I see a survivor.
A woman who raised herself from the wreckage—and walked.
My scars tell stories of love lost and nights survived,
of battles fought with nothing but my breath.

Try walking miles with your whole world strapped to your back.
You laugh at my layers. They keep me warm when the nights bite.
Here’s what you don’t know—how strong you are until the ground becomes your mattress.
I didn’t choose this, but I choose to keep breathing, even when it hurts.

You wrinkle your nose? Judge?
I take care of my bags. They’re clean—and if you don’t think that takes work—
you’ve never had to wash everything, every day, with nothing.

But you don’t care, do you?
Your glances cut sharper than hunger.
And hunger doesn’t define me—it’s just another battle I fight.
Your pity—lands heavier on my soul than my burdens.
I don’t need it.
I walk upright, even when the world expects me to crawl.

And every night, I sing to the stars.
They don’t care where I sleep.
They whisper to me—
truths you’re too scared to hear,
secrets the sheltered never know.

Lynne Curry, Ph.D., is the author of “Real-life Writing,” https://bit.ly/45lNbVo; “Writing from the Cabin,” https://bit.ly/3tazJpW; www.workplacecoachblog.com; Navigating Conflict: Tools for Difficult Conversations (https://amzn.to/3rCKoWj; Managing for Accountability: A Business Leader’s Toolbox (https://bit.ly/3T3vww8); Beating the Workplace Bully: A Tactical Guide to Taking Charge (https://amzn.to/3msclOW) and Solutions 911/411, (https://amzn.to/3ueSeXX)