Waves

_____You hold your ground through a tidal wave of thought, rushing, pounding, drenching you, and you said you wouldn’t ruminate, wouldn’t fixate. That you wouldn’t stare into the water, searching until your forehead burns and your mind is mush and all you know is impulse. Because impulse tells you to cup your hands and let the water pour over them, and you check it, examine it, decode it—turn it over in your mind as you try to scour an ocean of water for the tiny speck of sand that will finally tell you what went wrong. But the sand tells you nothing, sand is only sand, and thoughts are water, so you stop and breathe and take your hands out of the ocean, because you’re drenched but not drowning. You’re building dams, digging ditches, learning to direct the water away, to put it to use. That’s good mental hygiene, that’s brushing your teeth and washing your face with soap and water, but not with the tidal wave because all you can do is let it flow around you. You let it go. You stand steady until the wave sinks again, only as high as your ankles. Only then do you cup your hands and splash yourself and let the coolness soothe the burning in your head.

Catherine Yeates is a writer and illustrator. They received their PhD in neuroscience and create writing and art on themes of cognition, perception, and identity. They can be found at cjyeates.com.

Peter J. King was born and brought up in Boston, Lincolnshire. Active on the
London poetry scene in the 1970s as poet, editor, performer, publisher, and
organiser, he returned to poetry in 2013 after a long absence, and has since
been widely published in journals and anthologies. He also translates poetry,
mainly from modern Greek (with philosopher Andrea Christofidou) and
German, writes short prose, and paints. His currently available collections are
Adding Colours to the Chameleon (Wisdom’s Bottom Press), All What Larkin
(Albion Beatnik Press), and Ghost Webs (just out from The Calliope Script).
https://wisdomsbottompress.wordpress.com/peter-j-king/

Three Sheets

He shotgunned another beer before he called his sister. She’d been leaving him message after message; the tape on the answering machine was threadbare by this point. “It’s about time,” she said when she heard his voice, hers snappish as ever, because she was the younger sister and never tired of being disappointed by the scraps and hand-me-downs that life had thrown her way.

What did she want, though? She never said—at least, not until after the fact—preferring instead to play the martyr. He got up to find a book of matches and almost knocked over a floor lamp. Tiredness had made him clumsy.

Outside, it was starting to snow. He lit a cigarette, holding the phone between his cheek and shoulder as she rattled off her latest list of grievances. Then, “So what do you have to say about that?” It was a statement, not a real question, and he wasn’t sure what to take from it. Sometimes he was in the mood for her guessing games, or at least a willing participant. Tonight, he couldn’t muster the energy.

They went through the motions. Contrition (on his part, of course), and a short lecture—he needed to get his life together, tomorrow is a new day, et cetera, all the staples—and the call ended on a good note, he thought. He’d managed to hold up his end of the bargain.

She hung up the phone and said, “Well, he was three sheets to the wind.” She drummed her fingers restlessly on the table. It was getting late. She stood and paced around the room, thinking, thinking. But what could be done? He lived two states away. Briefly, she paused at the window, pulling the curtains back and looking outside. Her pulse was racing. “You should have heard him,” she said.

Her husband looked up from the newspaper and nodded. Her pronouncements didn’t usually require much of a response. She just liked the running commentary to be acknowledged. She walked into another room. When he had finished the last few pages, he extinguished the fire and went up to bed. Downstairs, he could hear her clattering around in the kitchen, unloading and reloading the dishwasher, and talking to the dog. From this distance, he couldn’t make out the words. The dog was old and deaf, though, and didn’t seem to notice or mind.

Then he must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew, she was climbing into bed. He could smell the lotion she slathered onto her skin every night in the bathroom. There was a click, and a soft rush of air as the heat turned on. Next to him, she shifted and sighed and pushed her pillows this way and that.

He closed his eyes again and thought of her brother, and the dog downstairs in its bed, and his wife, and everyone else on this cold night, all of them turning and turning and turning, trying to find a comfortable position.

Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press. Her stories have been published in Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, Flock, Necessary Fiction, The Petigru Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Newfound, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. 

Song of the Deeply Underappreciated

Who is in charge of the ratings for this fine day
turning gray around the edges? So many hard objects
are jockeying for the number one position. A bright
idea is gaining on them, and the weather is always
a solid contender. What will hold my attention? It has been
made to be grabbed, but I would like some caressing.
Perhaps a ripple through the grass or a vague form
settling on an unconcerned rock. I smell the exhaust
of a handheld machine. Now there’s this song of the deeply
underappreciated trying to climb to the top of the charts.

*This poem first appeared in the anthology Open: Post Pandemic Anthology of Literature.

Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019) and California Sijo (Bald Trickster, 2022). His work has been published in many journals in the U.S and abroad. He is also an editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Alliance. He builds flutes, plays them and plays guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos and touches on many other instruments from around the world. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.

your shadow

My shadow touches the wind around us and
cuts my soul to place it in your arms.
Sometimes I draw myself as a stilted stick
figure with my hands on my head. Sometimes
I let the simplicity of it remove my shadow
from your gaze. People paint with their hearts
and try to make it a song of love. I let my
shadow fall into yours and mix together, black
ink on black ink against the night sky create
warmth likening to a forehead kiss. I am grief
and I am love. These two try to coalesce and
wander around us, they become the wind that
cut me. It’s been a few minutes and all you’ve
done is look at me and all I’ve done is look at
you looking. It’s been years and we are still
here, placing our grief and love on our
shadows that never lost touch. No one gets up
to find their shoes and walk away. This is the
only way for me to tell you I am here.

Syed Raian Abedin is an avid learner in all things pertaining to art and literature. He is one of the founders as well as an Editor-in-Chief of Kitchen Sink: A Literary Journal, the first online journal in Bangladesh dedicated entirely to poetry. 

Poem Written in November (After Tu Fu)

I part my curtains and stare
at the distant moon.
Beyond the dead moon,
the stars are dying.
I lay alone in my bed.
Clouds huddle together,
speaking of nasty weather.
The blue grass at the river’s edge
is frozen. It will snow.
It won’t be long.
I’ve reached sixty.
Spring is still far off.
I watch leaves fall from the trees.
Life is a terminal disease.
I suddenly fall to my knees.

***

Night Thoughts (After Mei Yao Chen)

I can see nothing moving
on this dark night.
The sky is a black pit.
The moon is a thin slit.
There’s no one
to share wine with.
In a bare oak tree,
I stare at a heron’s nest.
The young have departed.
The nest is now empty.
I’m sixty-three.
I drink my wine alone.
When young I’d find
a symbol for a poem.
But herons
and that oak tree
mean nothing now to me.

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.

Untitled

_in the darkness
we speak out our feelings
protected by our dimmed perceptions
words in the morning are easily denied
attributed to moonlight and wine
and you do not fool me when I touch you
you come undone when things slip into comfort
you run away and brace the winds and test your strength
because this story is nothing new
and you are not the first story waiting to happen
to spill into the sunlight

Margot Block has been writing since the age of fourteen and has been published in Zygote Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Juice, the Collective Consciousness, Voices, Grub Street Literary Magazine, Bakwa Magazine, Cholla Needles, and the online journals BlazeVox, Kaleidoscope Online, the Bombay Review, and Kritikos: A Postmodern Journal of Cultural Sound, Text and Image. She participated in the high school mentorship program with the Manitoba Writers Guild, working with canadian poet Carol Rose. She won first prize in a poetry contest sponsored by the Writers Collective and an honorable mention in a poetry contest with the Lake Winnipeg Writers Group.

The Plane

A jet-fueled torpedo
slices sound into
sharp-edged fragments
that sever wind’s
soft brush through pine
needles, splits blue
sky with a white
contrail that slowly
blurs with the plane’s
retreat across a far
horizon and roars
dissolve into a quiet
blush of breeze.

Richard Dinges, Jr. lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and ten chickens. WINK, Green Hills Literary Lantern, SBLAAM, Roanoke Review, and Home Planet News most recently accepted his poems for their publications.

Secrets

Walking in the foothills,
together, you wearing that wide-brimmed,
floppy hat, which cost you dearly when you
flirted with what amounted to a salesboy,
right in front of me, as if I were your cuckold,
and you were my hotwife, even though we
were never married.

Step by step, stride for stride,
we negotiate the path, with wild grasses
marking our way, grey clouds overhead
like boats without sails, drifting: the day
a circle, your tenseness palpable,

the wind blowing by us like someone we
can’t remember, like you with your secrets,
and your thinking about things you think
I don’t know.

***

On Your Leaving

Things end. Except for those that don’t.
Like the serpent’s circle or parallel lines
that never meet.

It is said that the Buddha experienced
a hundred-thousand past lives the night
before he attained enlightenment, and that
we exist within an infinite past that is behind
us and an infinite future that is in front of us.

You may believe that something is over,
but truly, that may not be the case. I ask,
what can eventually cease that never really
began?

Your leaving was like the autumn leaves
that have fallen to the ground, and have been
covered up by the first snows of winter,

waiting for the thaw to be revealed.

Neal Zirn writes, “I was born and raised in the Bronx and I am a retired chiropractor. My work has appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and Canada including Blueline, Mudfish, Nerve Cowboy, Concho River Review, The Dalhousie Revue, The Big Windows Review, and Shot Glass Journal. I have placed seven times in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and my chapbook, Manhattan Cream, was published by MuscleHead Press.”