Shearing

Watching Anita deadhead first lilies, then roses
I wonder if they hurt
The way we do
When family and friends
Money and jobs
Are taken from us

Well, we can count on winter
And, in the meantime
One can do worse than flower

Alan Cohen/Poet first/Then PCMD, teacher, manager, researcher, writer/Living a full varied life/To optimize time and influence/Deferred publication, wrote/Average 3 poems a month/For 60 years/Beginning now to share some of his discoveries/180 poems accepted for publication in the past two years/Married to Anita 44 years/in Eugene, OR. these past 13 happy years.

Labor Day 1998

Father had been dead a week
when a storm
hit that was so violent

for a day or two
I was distracted
and relieved
not to have to think
about him.

Agreed to disagree.
Many things unsaid.

Alone in his house, dark
and silent
I passed the time
with his empty shoes

Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe literary journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Whiskey Island, Guernica, The Main Street Rag, and Nine Mile Review among others.

Cowboy Coffee

Now we’re cooking.
Now we’re cooking with burning tires.
Now we’re cooking with motor oil.
Now we’re cooking with uranium.
Now we’re cooking with turpentine.
Now we’re cooking with Vaseline.
Now we’re cooking with napalm.
Now we’re cooking with greasy kid’s stuff.
Now we’re cooking with Grand Funk Railroad.
Now we’re cooking with furniture polish.
Now we’re cooking with Sterno.
Now we’re cooking with lighter fluid.
Now we’re cooking with sulphuric acid.
Now we’re cooking with KY jelly.
Now we’re cooking with anti-freeze.
Now we’re cooking with Agent Orange.
Now we’re cooking.

Ian Ganassi’s  work has appeared recently or will appear soon, in numerous literary magazines, including New American Writing; Home Planet News Survision, BlazeVox, and Otoliths. My second poetry collection, True for the Moment, is now available, along with my first collection, Mean Numbers. A third collection is due out in 2024. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at www.thecorpses.com. I am a longtime resident of New Haven, Connecticut.

Betting on Cats

Sometimes I just want to snarl. I want to walk around with it on my face like a dare, like a threat. What the fuck are you looking at? Resentment compounds with reflection. The ghosts running the show must hate my guts. No, I’m not walking around in camo-wear, that’s not how I roll. I’ve always maintained a sense of style, even through times of extreme stress and want like the present moment. This explains my sharpness, my anger. Who isn’t angry these days? “Arturo,” I ask my landlord, “are you angry?” He sucks on his unlit cigarillo and says, “Why angry? Life is beautiful. Only stupid people are angry.” I guess that shuts my trap for the moment, eh. I move on to other people who might commiserate with my current state of mind. “You’re suffering from malaise,” says Brico, a poker acquaintance with a psychology background, though he works in finance now. He rarely says anything stupid, unlike the rest of our poker crew, myself included. I am always babbling like a fool. I can’t help myself. My shut up button doesn’t work. I’m fucked. I don’t know what’s up, I don’t know what’s down. “Are you nuts?” exclaims my bookie Dom for betting exclusively on cats. “You know me, Dom,” I say. “I try to make gambling seem more fun than it is.”  He smiles like a man who immensely enjoys his vocation and all the interesting people he gets to meet in its pursuit. “Nevertheless, you owe me four large,” he says. “That’s a long bus trip,” I say. The big cats had been doing well until then. The Lions, the Jaguars, the Panthers. But the last Sabbath and its partisan philistines had summarily declawed them. How in the world will I generate four large? “Time and dispersement restraints don’t permit me to cut you any slack this time,” Dom confesses without looking at me as he speaks. Rather, he fusses with a button on his sports coat cuff. “There were a lot of injuries,” I say. Dom smiles again. “Do you mean there will be a lot of injuries?” he says, stifling a laugh. Yeah, funny Dom. I’m with you on this. Lockstep. “See you later?” he says. “You bet,” I say. “No,” he says, “you bet. Haha.” With that, I plunge a serrated dagger in his throat and rip it open. He clutches his gashed throat as blood jets out between his fingers, his eyes rolling back, a silent scream twisting his face. “Everything okay?” Dom asks, frowning at me. I smile, pocketing my ghost dagger. “Yeah, all good, Dom.”

Salvatore Difalco’s work has appeared in a number of print and online formats. He lives in Toronto.

The Light

The light is
Bright but
It is still night.
The grass won’t
Last because the
Sheep are too fast.
Our lives will
End because
God sent the
Wrong men.

Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. His poetry has been published in various literary magazines including Fresh Words and Berlin Lit. His poetry was long listed in the VOLE Books Summer Competition 2023 and was a finalist in the Flying South Contest 2023.

It is Written

Yes. I have an ego like a Brontosaurus. It is thirty stories tall and leathery. It won’t eat anything with a soul, but you’d best watch out for that swaying neck.

Yes. I want the tiaras, stacked like heretic halos. I want enough Pushcart nominations to cause a traffic incident. I want pizza delivery to be delayed because my words split the sidewalks.

Yes. I want the yes on the tall shelf. I want you to drench me in rose petals. I want a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on my ankle so I will never forget that I am “oui.”

Yes. I have been here before. I have spliced particle physics with pyrotechnic poetry in the greasy gymnastics of online dating. I have checked my inbox every eleven minutes for the ones I like to like me so I can still have light when my power fails.

Yes. All of this is the hunt for the hit. I wanted acceptance from husband holograms, and I wrote myself into their expectations. I want acceptance from story sergeants, but the stakes are higher because this time I am telling the truth.

Yes. This oozes with addiction, and the returns diminish. What once felt like atomic assurance is now a drowsy game of badminton. This morning’s “congratulations” is charred by dusk. Yeses add up to little. I like my words when I forget to be “likable,” but they congeal on the stove of submissions.

Yes. This is all grand. Writing is worth it. My life is a comedy. There are cat hairs in my microwave and limbo poles at the corners of my eyes. I cannot describe my divorce without bringing in Weird Al, or walruses, or the wind-sock people at the car dealership. I cannot grease myself in grief without a mouthful of honey-butter.

Yes. I want my words to count, and I am incompetent at math. I want to feed the starving. I want to heal the sick. I want to run through the cave pulling candles from my crown, until the people in darkness circle up with light. I want to write people free.

Yes. I have a savior complex, an inferiority complex, and an infatuation with affirmation. If we are capable of being damned, I am doomed. My hands are red and sticky from the caramel apple. It is good, and it is evil. I am incapable of telling the difference.

Yes. It is written. Whether we are speaking of my brown hair, my punk pancreas, or my dervish drive, my mother claims, “it’s in your book.” I don’t know where faith becomes fatalism. My book will not go unread. I live not by bread, but by every word from the mouth with no ego.

Yes. I am still hungry. I bite my own neck, then read the Beatitudes. I am poor in spirit. I contemplate pawning my pride. I buy a plastic Eiffel Tower for my desk instead.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar. Her work appears in Cagibi, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Razor, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has had Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and laughs with her mother daily.

Heaven and Hell

Silence fills the air,
as I sit, alone,
among endless rows of graves.

I wish for heartbeats,
for laughter,
for tears.

I miss the noise.

But I know that I can’t have it.

I can hear the footsteps of the living,
but there’s no sound for me.

Silence surrounds me,
as I lay in my own void,
a void of life,
eternal and silent.

I will never know happiness again.

But I accept it,
lying here, alone,
among endless rows of graves.

It was fun being dead for a while,
to feel the quiet
and the peace.
I thought hell would have fire and brimstone,
but I guess that’s only what they tell us.

I’m moving on now,
accepting my reality.
And I know that one day,
I’ll find my meaning,
in the cold abyss.

But for now, all I have is silence,
a silence that never ends.

And I bet there’s fire in heaven.

Claudia Wysocky, a Polish poet based now in New York, is known for her ability to capture the beauty of life through rich descriptions in her writing. She firmly believes that art has the potential to inspire positive change. With over five years of experience in fiction writing, Claudia has had her poems published in local newspapers and magazines. For her, writing is an endless journey and a powerful source of motivation.

A Poem about Time

I’m endlessly waiting,
perhaps for the right words
to express the arrival
of spring’s birds. Perhaps
for something not yet
come into being, something
which will amaze me.
The moon climbs the sky,
then suddenly it dies,
and my thoughts are paralyzed.
I look for the moon
in your unhappy eyes.
Your life is a mystery to me,
so I wait, and as I wait
a million leaves slowly grow
on a thousand trees.
And I grow older,
and the stars which were once
young and full of desire,
die, and sink to their knees.

George Freek’s poetry appears in numerous Journals and Reviews. His poem “Written At Blue Lake” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.

Everyone Was Nice

It should be annoying but isn’t,
that even here we’re collected
in comfortable rooms and sorted,
then carry documents
along sometimes the wrong but always
pleasant corridors to smaller rooms
and groups. We’re reminded
of the welfare states we were born in
and which at least a number of us hoped
would return. An idealized version –
for the ubiquitous officials
who help us to the right place are all young
and never seem annoyed or condescend.

A loose circle, couches;
decent coffee and pastries. We tell,
as expected, our stories.
It takes a while to grasp the common thread,
and not everyone does, because
it isn’t a thread but the whole cloth.
For this group life isn’t one thing after
another – which is easier to deal with, or
not – but one thing. Which
the incidents we crowdedly
recount (mine, I’ll admit,
the pettiest and most diffuse)
reveal … So that when

we’ve finished, and the pastries
and coffee are all gone, we
stare at each other with no idea
what to do; the room, as it were,
is full of monuments or philosophical
systems … We should admire, I think –
critique, polish – but all we manage
is silence. At which the officials,
who somehow receded, seem more visible.
They had better (the consensus is)
not ask us to relinquish those
statues; it would be
worse than what they’ve done with our bodies.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, September 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Windows Review (2020, ‘21), etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

Repair

All you whose lives I have crashed into–
or who’ve crashed into mine–
and then staggered away into the stream of the passing time,
this is to let you know that I have not given up
trying to fix everything.
Though we are of such obscure and dark machinery,
so easily broken, countless times and in countless ways,
I can’t help but insist:
all the pieces must still be present somewhere,
even if dispersed as far as the stars.
To persist in being:
to take up with daily care a consciousness
capable of filling space, of finding and holding
present the farthest fragments of our scattered
selves—we could not be made more perfect.