I Dream of My Death 

after Li Po

A cloud stumbles over
the remaining light,
as day dissolves into night.
A sickle moon cuts into my dreams.
Trees are bent like old men,
huddled around a circle of stones,
trying to warm fleshless bones.
I hear the lake’s waves,
cracking against the shore
like voices of the dead,
calling from their graves.
From the lake’s pavilion,
voices are faraway.
Are they happy or sad?
I no longer care. I can
barely hear them anymore.
Languid anemone line
the barren waste of the shore.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, IL. His poetry has appeared in Carcinogenic Poetry, The Adelaide Review, Off Course, The Tipton Poetry Journal, The Ottawa Review of the Arts, and The Sentinel Liteayr Quarterly. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays.

Decay

When there is nothing left but sky,
but air,
all there is to do
is look up
and wonder

Just You Wait Until Your Mother Gets Home

is it the hot dogs or the sense
of existential dread that keeps
us at the kitchen table, awake,
at two AM? We think this is
debatable, but we ran out
of relish three hours ago.
We pull the halves apart, add
the extension leaf, stare
into its starless void.

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in New American Legends, Toho Journal, and Chiron Review, among others.

you have to come to a certain place

with your eyes closed
your hands behind your back
fingers interlaced
toes pointing in
scarf slipping from your neck
a pigeon on your hat
a booger stuck in your nose hairs
a bead of sweat on the tip of each nipple
knees red
buttocks itchy
a fly’s the only wings on your shoulders

Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California, where he hosts Clearly Meant, a reading & interview series. He has two chapbooks, City Walks (broken boulder) and Fact (Avantacular). A multi-volume prose work, Thousand (MCTPub), is now available from Amazon.com; ebook from Smashwords. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read. Recent work has appeared in Courtship of Winds, Visitant, and Caveat Lector.

Identity

It would take an actuary
to count this colony of old Jews
who frequent a tailor from Palermo.
Once, I was a teacher, married late.
Polymorph, I am a composite
of chromosomes and scars.
Sometimes my old bull mastiff
perceives me as nothing,
sometimes everything.

Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), and three poetry chapbooks, most recently Imaginary Planet (Cervena Barva). His poems have appeared in River Styx, Nimrod International Journal, and Water ̴ Stone Review, among many others. Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review and the Nightjar Poetry Prize, he is also a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For further information, visit https://aelyshevitz.ink.

Dublin

Dublin in the sun
Stilted and foreign
Not used to the attention

The light moving into the corners and cracks
The bits of dust
The drunks, pale skin turned red

She showed herself
Down Camden Street
With the flowers and the fruit from Spain

The people squint from inside pubs
Or out on the quay drinking light pints
The canal starting to smell

Old men rolling up their pants
In Stephen’s Park
Winding trails of asphalt

Thrown out fried food
Mixed with glass
And dried blood on the curb

Then the night
A small red tinge in amorphous clouds
And a hint of quiet

Morgan Bazilian has published about 50 poems.

Morning Rise

Syringes and orange juice
Start the day,
An early morning fix
To get through
The beggar morning.

Naught

I regret nothing,
that zero.
How could it intrude
into the world of numbers?
We would be in our prime
if I called the shots.
But nothing is there
under the bed
and in the closet.
It’s odd these days,
and the nights uneven,
all empty as a ghost
hungry to be there.

Joseph Farley edited Axe Factory from 1986 – 2010. His books and chapbooks include Suckers, For the Birds, Longing for the Mother Tongue, Her Eyes, and Labor Day. Labor Day, a novel, is being reissued in a special edition by Peasantry Press. Farley’s work has appeared recently in US 1 Worksheets, Home Planet News Online, Mad Swirl, Ygdrasil, and Horror Sleeze Trash.

Signless Sky

For Khaqani (d. 1199), prison poet of Shirvan

Ever since I was a child,
I loved to stare at the stars.
Before I could trace the Pleiades,
I wanted to be an astronomer.

I learned to decipher the skies:
Perseus, Aquarius, Scorpio,
& Hercules gave me a compass
to navigate the heavens.

Khaqani,the Persian necromancer
who fancied himself a god.
taught me to read
the signs of fate inscribed above.

My childhood cosmos
rearranged Greek fantasies.
You read the signs of the Ka’ba
from your prison cell.

When the sky was stripped
of signs & my gods died,
our visions became one.
Khaqani, my troubadour.

Now, when I gaze upwards
at midnight, the signless sky
gazes back at me with your artful,
ineffable, incarcerated sighs.

Rebecca Ruth Gould‘s poems and translations have appeared in Nimrod, Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Hudson Review, Waxwing, Wasafiri, and Poetry Wales. She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems, by Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and Other Stories, by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and (with Kayvan Tahmasebian) for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017).