Shake Hands with Impermanence

I appreciate hands,
those with natural gifts and learned skills,
admire the ones that push aside the ordinary and plain.

Some make flour rise with free spirits,
direct ingredients from the farmer’s market
to act in a culinary play.

Others merge planks of wood to build custom furniture and floors,
with beauty and function,
or cut right-angled shelves to shelter food, books, and ideas.

Skilled potters mold clay, form and glaze ceramics
with the fulcrum of eyes in their fingers,
make objects that will hold things and balance the weight of rooms.

Jewelry makers place select metals and gems into circles of light.
Fabric craft hands create unique coverings to give comfort
for people, walls, and naked floors.

Balancing nuances of colors,
artists draw and paint from ethereal dreams.
Some carve living features into the hearts of wood and stone.

Musicians use keys, opening sounds from sensory stories,
swirling in space with tapping steps
of barefoot notes, dancing in the sky.

These creative ones, listen to fleeing moments,
hear silent voices,
gently shake hands with impermanence.

David Lipsitz started writing poetry 50 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Big Windows Review, Washington Square Review, From The Depths, Chaffin Journal, Cape Rock, Main Street Rag, and other poetry publications.

Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, and many others. His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech University Press First Book Award, and his second story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023. His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.

Dear Frank

You’ve been dead 6 years.
What, you can’t call?
Can’t write? Can’t
knock in the middle
of night? Come on,
man. Bro, I need a
hand, some consolation.
You hear me? Will
you meet me on that
bright hill, Brother?
A hug for posterity?
One last laugh before
the hammer falls? I
know you can do it,
Frank. This favor is
all I’ve ever asked
for. Greet me one last
time at the crossroads.
Don’t let me weep
alone in this darkness.

Paul Lojeski was born and raised in Lakewood, Ohio. His poetry has appeared online and in print. He lives in Port Jefferson, NY.

Return

The old haunted house, the legion of dares, the field of fumbling sweet encounters.  One long line of:  dare you to stand on the porch; dare you to throw a rock; dare you to set eyes around the missing front door; dare you to leap into the living room: to shout, to possibly, prayerfully, get Lindsey to be with you inside, to be the ghost of your imagination.  Lindsey:  blonde hair, a bevy of clasps and buttons and fingers of cloth and bungling buckles and hooks and opportunity and processes.  Go ahead.  Drag the old mattress found inviting on the dust and broken glass of a second-floor bedroom down the stairs to make it even more brazenly inviting.  You are not scared, are you?  The stairs creak and would have been at one time the base of stalking monsters, the heavy ghosts of former residents.  Outside, boys the age you were seemingly moments ago get to the porch, throw a rock through paneless window, push a face mere inches inside the door, invade briefly the living room, shouting as you and Lindsey stand barely hand in hand achieving nothing, uncertain what could be achieved, the mattress stained and flat on one side, an artifact, a remnant of the glories in the onetime-lives of those who now haunt this place.  As simple as the memory, years ahead, of what could have been done but was not, your inabilities coiled suspiciously and hauntingly around you.  Listen for clues.

Ken Poyner’s four collections of flash fiction and four of speculative poetry are available from most web booksellers. He was an information warrior for thirty-three years, and now supports full time his wife’s powerlifting. Recent work has appeared in Analog, Café Irreal, Rune Bear, and Tiny Molecules. www.kpoyner.com

Listen

We’re introduced
and engage in small talk–
String Quartet, Op. 4.

All the score:
the notes in each bar,
the articulation, the tone;
we have so much
to learn from one
another.

We listen closely.
More than once.
We watch the night
paint surfaces and we
take notes.

What more can we do?
The music becomes richer,
more precise as we draw
closer than before.

Jack Galmitz was born in 1951 in New York City. He attended the public schools from which he graduated. His poems and stories have been published in various journals, including Otoliths, Synchronized Chaos, and noon: a journal of the short poem. He lives with his wife in Queens, New York.

Immortality

Let me leave my words
on the street to raise themselves.
Let them ferment like fallen fruit—
let the rats get drunk on them,
let them scatter.
Carve my name on the ice of a river;
watch while it melts—let it be
carried to the sea and join the currents.
Let me bury my memories just before
the water breeches the levee.
Let the coffins be unearthed in the flood.
Let my immortality be quiet, insidious.

***

Alleys

The past strolls down a path, whistling, hands in pockets. Before she moved, our
neighbor mixed her husband’s ashes with those from his dogs, and wove them through
the alleys behind our houses. He had always sat on his front porch, drink in hand,
shouting at passers-by. He was part of the air, become part of the earth. The wife who
left became ghost.

Danielle Hanson strives to create and facilitate wonder. She is author of Fraying Edge of Sky and Ambushing Water. Her poetry was the basis for a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. She is Marketing Director for Sundress Publications, and serves on their Editorial Board. Previously, she has been Artist-in-Residence at Arts Beacon, Writer-in-Residence for Georgia Writers, and Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books. She teaches poetry at UC Irvine. More at daniellejhanson.com.

THE CORONA BUS             

The bus has come from another realm
with its skin of a graffiti wall

made of fresh roses, orchids and hyacinths
scattered all over its body

It honks outside the gate now
And I hurry up for it won’t wait

When I enter, I see passengers
from every place, from far-off

China, India, Africa,
and the countries down under

This bus is cosmopolitan like death
unbiased in the choice of passengers

The bright faces all dressed in white
crane their necks from the windows

as though it is their final journey
freedom from the drudgery

There are no more belongings
No luggage for this

unexpected journey     The driver
looks tired yet wears a mystic smile

It must be his hundredth trip
or more           He is working overtime

When I say, I have nothing
to pay for a ticket,

he curves his lips some more,
This journey is beyond money

Debasish Mishra is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019. His recent writing has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, Amsterdam Quarterly, California Quarterly, The Headlight Review, and elsewhere. His first book Lost in Obscurity was recently released by Book Street Publications.

So Much Depended

upon
the notebook

always
in my pocket

with scribbles
and snippets

yesterday
first in the washing machine

then confetti blowing
out the dryer

vent

*Adapted from a Facebook post by the poet Marc Janssen, 12/21/2021.

David A. Goodrum is a writer and photographer living in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in Spillway, Star 82 Review, The Write Launch, The Closed Eye Open, Fireweed: Poetry of Oregon, The Louisville Review, and other journals. Additional work (both poetry and photography) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Friday Night at Seven

Kneeling made the room feel regal.
You became a staircase of scars
I used my tongue and hands to climb
all the way to heaven.

Hell is the way it felt to live
as if the mind was King,
as if landmines left by thoughts
were flowers to be picked.

Saluting cruelty’s softer side,
something tender, almost kind,
raised me to my feet like Christ,
pierced by heavy metal.

Terror asked permission
to laugh like us:
naked tricksters gagging on time,
in moments we made matter.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, New Plains Review, Flint Hills Review, Plainsongs, and Book of Matches. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Fixing a Saw

Those years ago, I thought him desolate,
the old man in frost, fixing
a chainsaw by car light, battling
numb fingers; the fading patience
of those around was like the cold,
to be mastered or ignored.
That he’d catch his death was little more
than a child’s admonishment. There were other,
newer saws to fetch, to borrow.
No. I can still sense the gritting of teeth,
the beam catching his shadow
as he shifted on his coat.

He was old, stubborn, unreasonable,
waging war on the dark and a spring
the thinness of a hair.
No again. He was, as the headlights
died and he marked in his mind
the place where the last,
missing piece rolled,
a colossus.

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada, and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding and Beverly Downs. His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com