Two Poems by John S. Eustis

The Death Game

A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game.
The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died—
like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person
to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone.
As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered
the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.

They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way
of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes.
The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear.
Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way
to determine who was first with the ghoulish news.
Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.

Although the game could easily be adapted to texting,
it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.

*

The House We Almost Bought

I drive by it now and then
to remind myself how different
life would be right now if we
had gone through with it.
Tina absolutely wanted to buy
and was willing to bid above
the asking price, but I said no.

Our marriage was in trouble
and purchasing a house would not
have helped the situation. Instead,
it would have simply added the stress
of a huge debt to our already fragile
circumstance. Less than a year later
we were moving into our divorce,
and she was physically moving
to a new apartment. I stayed
in the house we rented, which I
could barely afford at the time.

If we had bought that property,
we would have inevitably had to
sell it and both look for places.
Or worse, I would have ended up
buying her a house. Probably not,
but you can never be too sure.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.

Four Poems by Laurie Kuntz

The Pre-Test

It’s the printer again,
like a body growing old,
the ink runs dry,
invisible paper jams,
lights that flash without reason,
and I call to you, and you fix it.

After a thankful hug, I ask
What will I do without you?
This is surreal to think about
when I count backwards to our beginnings
tapping ten fingers more than five times.
These days are like spelling pretests
preparing for those difficult words that defy
the i before e rule.

When I look toward an unreliable future
everything becomes a test:
I can mow the lawn,
pay estimated taxes
kill the spider, which is really practice
for the roach, recognize the flashing fuel light,
and know when to press Ctrl Alt Delete,
the list of can do’s can go on forever,
only because we will not.

I know without you, I can
and will pass these tests,
but fail miserably at the same time.

*

Searching for Gold

Bracing the wind, Laura, in a red sock hat,
reads the instruction booklet of this holiday gift,
the metal detector you’ve wanted since you were a child,
growing up in rural places, where treasures were part of the lore.

Now, on an urban beach in January,
you search and dig, sand blowing in your aging face.
You yell against the rising tide, hoping Laura can hear,

It is more the hunt than the treasure that I love,

because you can see clearly,
that the treasure is standing next to you,
reading the instruction booklet.

*

Friendship, Like Marriage

In celebration for every year
of marriage, there is a symbol
the fragility of paper,
the merge of time,
the burning passion of wood
and copper in its polished shine.

What elements symbolize friendship
in its stretch of years,
and isn’t friendship a marriage in kind,
with its own separations and secrets
splayed across wires,
promises untied while riding waves
of unbridled trust.

My friend, for all our time together,
nothing more can be said except:
I do, I do, I do.

*

A Mother’s Work

It was twenty years ago,
the night you graduated from high school.
Of course, there was the after party,
and you swaggered into the house way after curfew.
You turned to me and said:
“Well, your work is done.”
In tired irony, I replied:
“It is 3:00 A.M., and I am still up,
my work will never be done.”
Today, marks a month before your daughter is due
to enter the world, and I, as a soon to be Grandmother,
should be thinking of bassinets and bottles,
but the memory of your post curfew high school after party
comes to me, as I am still up and waiting.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

After All These Years by Gloria Heffernan

After All These Years

In another room,
at the other end of the house,
my husband talks on the phone
for an hour with his ex-wife
discussing the joys and sorrows,
wonders and worries of their children,
the oldest of whom is fifty-four.

A frequent enough occurrence,
I have grown so accustomed
to their conversations
that I sometimes forget to marvel
at the way they navigate
the geography of family.

Even now, thirty years after they ceased
being husband and wife,
they have never stopped being curators
of what they co-created,
parents, separate but together,
like the coiled strands of DNA
that course through
the generations.

“Your divorce is better
than most marriages,” I tease,
when the three of us find ourselves
together at the holiday dinner table.
They laugh good-naturedly at the quip,
but it’s really not a joke.

It’s a testament to harmony,
to the way voices blend different notes
to create a more complex music.
I listen and am quietly awestruck as I think,
This is what peace sounds like.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him by Paula R. Hilton

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

I was 27 when my mother pressed
her wedding band into my hand.
I’m so angry. I don’t want it.
Startled by venom in her voice,
I took it but told her I had no idea
what to do with it. Melt it down,
sell it, give it away. I don’t care.

Dad had dementia but hid his condition.
The man people flocked to for financial
advice died with the trunk of his Ford
stuffed with unpaid bills. Mom screamed
like a wounded animal. He’d bankrupted us.

A decade later, her memories soften.
Tells me Dad had been a great kisser.
He made my ears burn. She also shares
some advice. Don’t say you never knew him.
Say you didn’t know the extent of his illness.

I go to my room. Pull her band from
the jewelry box where it’s waited for
3,650 days, ask her if she wants it back.
She takes the gold ring from my open
palm. Slips it back on. Yes, she says, I do.

*

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Feminine Collective, The Tulane Review, and many others. Her poetry collection, At Any Given Second, was selected by Kirkus as one of its best books of 2021. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Learn more at https://paularhilton.com

Marriage Dance: Year 45 by Dick Westheimer

Marriage Dance: Year 45

Most nights it’s the same:
an onion sliced skin-thin,
cashews stirred in, over the flame,

while I go to the cellar
for garlic and winter squash.
The kitchen smells

of olive oil and the onions
now sugar sweet—are an almost
burning sap. Garlic

oils my fingertips which
I bring to my lips and lick
till the glow illuminates

my appetites. The skillet shimmers
syrupy and begs
for savory company—

the garlic and squash,
over-wintered collards,
just picked and washed.

My wife waits to come over
and brush against my hip
till I put down the knife.

She knows I hone it sharp enough
to shave. She knows that when I stand
over the cutting board, I am

married to wood and vegetable
and blade. She knows that I can
love only one thing at a time.

I tell her she is a lucky woman—
that I love her as well as my
kitchen tools that I’ve seasoned

and sharpened and cared for
since before our time. She sets the table,
lights a little flame, and doesn’t say a thing.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio, his home for nearly 50 years, with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends by Maria Surricchio

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends

       with a line by Seamus Heaney

Snow beyond the window
fills every corner—empty
of sound—piles in restless
drifts like the train
that just passed through
the town and didn’t stop,
the wisps the planes leave
across the sky. Into the room
where she sits—orphaned
in a little patch of light
he steps, his lips against
her cheek are warm
and dry. She has forgotten
he can be warm.

*

Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in Blackbird, Salamander, Chicago Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, On the Seawall, The Comstock Review and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and holds an MFA from Pacific University.

Two Poems by Sarah Carleton

Old-Time Music

Check out that rosin on my fiddle, a sign
of repeated sawing,

pine-pitch leavings that built up without my noticing
as, month after month

I glided the bow back and forth across the amber
puck then stroked the strings,

motes vibrating off the ribbon of horse hair
and settling onto the wood.

The hard, glassy cake, like an always-full purse
from a folk tale, never gets smaller

though the white dune behind the instrument’s
bridge keeps growing,

the way sand arises from shells ground down
over millennia,

the earth showing its staying power
in the plushness of its beaches. For so long

I’ve pulsed to this music—you can measure
my love by the thickness of the dust.

*

Marriage

Check out this woman
my husband says.
She dances like you.
Even after months in which
I sit cross-legged all day
on the couch,
writing, knitting,
and years of folding sheets
and unloading groceries,
he still knows me
as she who moves to music.

*

Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, ONE ART, Valparaiso, SWWIM Every Day, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

What has Become of the First Marriage by Carolynn Kingyens

What has Become of the First Marriage

Whenever I see a mature-looking couple,
between early-to-mid sixties,
walking hand-in-hand with that obnoxious
look of late, middle age love,
I immediately know, stronger
than suspicion, that this is a second marriage,
possibly, a third.

Their bodies, still spry,
with the exception of their backs
now weary and slightly leaning
into the semblance
of a cursive C.

It’s at the garish, fluorescent-lit diner,
known for their early bird specials,
where I spot them next;
sitting side-by-side in the same
maroon-colored polyurethane-pleather
booth reminding me, for a moment,
of that yellow-tinged photograph
from a history book
back in middle school
of a pioneering couple,
sitting side-by-side as the husband
mans a dust-covered wagon
while his wife holds a long,
double barrel shotgun
across her lap during the era
of the California Gold Rush.

I ponder, wondering why
they just can’t sit across
from each other like the rest
of us disgruntled, cynical couples
well-seasoned in realism and romance,
knowing full well the value
of separate booths and bedrooms;
the value of personal space.

Perhaps we can blame it on
raising multiple children
notwithstanding the later care
of elderly parents
before the unexpected crash
and subsequent depletion
of your Roth IRA and 401K,
and our failure to launch,
rage-filled man-child, who’d turn us
prematurely gray in our thirties,
and who still keeps us
up at night with endless worry.

This is the kind of tumult
that depletes and desolates
first marriages into abysmal
shreds.

It’s as if some imaginary, sci-fi
vortex has sucked every
ounce of lust and desire
clean from the depths
of our loins, leaving our love
cagey and bone-dry.

Now when you reach out
your retired, manicured
hand across the tabletop;
across the universe;
it feels oddly foreign
and cold as a dead fish
with that thousand-yard
glaucoma-cloudy gaze,
finally yielding to its fate.

*

Carolynn Kingyens was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia. She is the author of two poetry collections, BEFORE THE BIG BANG MAKES A SOUND and Coupling, both published by Kelsay Books. In addition to poetry, she writes short fiction and narrative essays. Two of her short stories were selected for Best of Fiction 2021 and 2023 by Across the Margin, a Brooklyn arts & culture webzine. The audio version of the stories are available on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. And two of her essays, “There’s A Tiffany In Every Dysfunctional Family” (about the youngest sister of David and Amy Sedaris) and “How Creative Resilience Saved Me From Childhood Trauma” were recently republished by YourTango, a large, female-led NYC publisher. You can read some of her narrative essays on Medium, where she dives into a myriad of topics from The Royal Family to true crime.

Three Poems by Renee Williams

Bad Boys and Johnny Cash

How many times can you listen
to Folsom Prison Blues
at the request of a whiny five-year-old,
on the drive home from a trip to Florida,
who’s forgotten her Tatters doll,
left at the hotel a hundred miles back,
who’s crying nonstop, still demanding
to listen to Johnny Cash,
stomping and slamming her sticky,
snot-encrusted fists against the back
of the head rest so many times
that everyone in the cars feels
like they are in prison and just wants
to toss her out on the highway?

My Dad caved, went back,
got the doll. Growing up, I’d
cut out photos of Cash,
and stick them on my bedroom walls
because I could never get enough
of the Man in Black.
Probably the start of something not good,
never any good…

My father is to blame for all of this,
for indulging me
and introducing me to motorcycles
and dragging me on the back
of that dilapidated dirt bike
into Snake Holler and having it break down
on us when we ran out of gas
and had to walk home,
Walk of Shame, clean home
to Mom, who wasn’t amused,
just wanting us to wash
off the mud, so we could
have a proper dinner.

The flurry of bad boys hit
until I straight up married a proper fellow,
who became an accountant and had tax season,
but I just wanted to party, so I found
a better one, the love of my life.

We married, and he got a bike,
and then several more,
multiplying like rabbits.
He even got me one
for my own self.

But I couldn’t tell Dad.
Because I knew he’d be jealous,
because he couldn’t ride anymore,
because he thought I was getting
CPR training to save his life,
when I was really taking
my motorcycle safety class.

But I wasn’t there
when the CPR was needed.

When I go to see Dad now,
I’m greeted by Hoss,
the sexton’s Old English bulldog pup,
who nearly knocks me down
with his 70 pounds of bad boy exuberance,
the therapy dog for the ones
who still have imprisoned pulses
who still have teary blues
who still have tattered hearts
walking among the headstones.

*

Unmoored

They say that grief comes in waves,
but I find it lapping at my feet
as ocean waves tease the shore,
ripples small and steady for so long,
until one plows into me,
nearly knocking me off my feet.

Bobbing like a buoy in rough surf
I’m staggering through this life
no longer chained to commitments
and now I don’t know what to do.
Maybe the saddest thing in the world
is a caregiver
who no longer
has anyone to care for.

Tears won’t stop no matter how I try,
but lies come easily.
Everyone will believe I’m just suffering
from those darned allergies, right,
or maybe raging sinuses?
It’s been over a month.
Shouldn’t I be moving on by now?

I seek messages and meaning
in feathers and foliage,
creatures and constellations.
And I am left
as befuddled as I was
when my feet hit the floor
this morning.

*

We Know You Here

Our priest asks us to step into the light,
not to hide in the darkness.
I understand the metaphor,
but the reality horrifies me.
I recoil.

The sun, beautiful muse of goodness,
is not where I belong.
Please leave me here in the dark
and let the messages
come to me. In the shaded woods
illuminated only by moonlight
I am comforted, nurtured, restored.
Deer peek at me from the brush
eyes aflame, yet they do not fear me.
The chorus of spring peepers reminds me
this is my home. Safety is here.
Yes, coyotes prowl these hills at night
but they, too, will avoid me.
Ancient opossums traipse through the lawn
and sometimes a raccoon or rabbit or two
may join them. Nuisances, annoyances,
problems to so many, but here, they have a place.

I dance with Luna moths,
letting them light on my fingertips,
precious butterflies of the night.
Stay with me, I urge them.
The light is not your friend.
It will hurt you as it has me
mutilating and maiming.

But the sunlight beckons me forth
the highest card in the Tarot
the child astride a stallion
beams of light surrounding him.
I am drawn to that beacon of warmth.
I want to bask in those soothing rays.
But it’s an illusion.

I step back into the night and breathe.
Crisp night air fills my lungs.
Stars fall from the sky, as if offering me gifts
to welcome me home.
Stay, they tell me.
We know you here.

*

Renee Williams is from Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a retired English instructor whose poetry has appeared in Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press zines, Verse-Virtual, Deep South Magazine, Panoply, Impspired, Sein und Werden, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, and Beatnik Cowboy among others. She has written interviews and concert reviews for Guitar Digest, as well. Her photography has been featured in the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendars, the Santa Fe Review, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, Swim Press, Lumineire as well as several others. She enjoys spending time with her family and dogs; she takes orders from her cranky cat who bosses her around daily.

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

Affairs in Order

We were so thorough,
giving our kids instructions,
account names and passwords
should we suddenly die
while on this island for so long
trying to weave ourselves back together.
Even noted who to invite to our funeral.
Except, I realize,
shaded next to my husband
under a beach umbrella,

maybe she should be on that list.
He’d want her to know,
to be there. She might attend,
with me gone. But then she’d see
photos of our life together –
Soul kissing in the high Sierra
or when I was chemo bald,
my face in his hands. That time we
made the most of a blizzard,
piggy-backed on a sled.
Would she wonder
if she really knew him,
still mourn their romance?
And him?

When he deleted their texts,
did his phone, a hive
sheltering their intimacies,
become a shrine,
her name and number sacred relics?
Does he return to her on a breath
of rosemary, grieve
for lost things that won’t happen –
his fingers braided with her hair,
hers mapping the marriage
line of his palm?

*

Reunited

I still think you’ll rise from the floor
you collapsed on, your wine glass,
its shards rejoined, brought back
to your open lips.

Even on our wedding day, I wondered
who would go first,
if I’d wake one night
to your stopped
rhythm, if you’d wake to mine,
your arm on my mute chest.
And all the what if’s since:
if each clink of raised glasses was the last.
If I was laughing at your final
one-liner before you were downed
by a mass shooter, a speeding truck,
or I was.
If each word was the parting one–
the voice in my head yelling Stop! Stop!
as I yelled at you for leaving
your shoes where I would trip on them,
irritated when you talked too much,
my last thought
while one of us still breathed.

They tell me to choose clothes for your burial.
I picture the suit you wore to marry me
sagging, rotting in a dirt-smothered box.
I clutch your comb, your slippers,
gut the laundry for your socks, a t-shirt
still sour, damp with your sweat.
I put them all on,
curl under covers
on your side of the bed,
find a hair on your pillowcase
and swallow it.

*

Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.

HOW GORILLA GLUE COULDN’T SAVE MY MARRIAGE by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins

HOW GORILLA GLUE COULDN’T SAVE MY MARRIAGE

When I got married, my friend
got me a gift certificate to Williams & Sonoma.
I used it to buy a butter dish, a bread knife,
and some fancy cheese I didn’t end up liking.
Two years later, she jumped
off a bridge in Boston into the Mystic River.
A few years later, my husband broke
the handle off the butter dish,
and then he left me, too. He didn’t break
the butter dish on purpose, but I think about it
all the time—the way he used Gorilla Glue
to put the knob back on after I threw
myself on the kitchen floor, crying.
It’s just a butter dish, he said, and he wasn’t wrong,
I guess, but he was. If it’s stupid
to have an emotional attachment
to a butter dish, that’s okay.
But I’ve loved it longer
than my husband could love me,
and I’ll let you decide what that means.

*

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Look for her work in The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Sharon Charde

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

I think that a lot of girls and young women have this yearning
that is part desire to have a man and part desire to be him
–Rebecca Solnit

Light comes and goes in the story of us.
Out here in Wyoming, the deer are different

and I don’t know the names of the birds,
but I do know I am happy without you.

This landscape forgives me my sins, too huge
for them to matter though someone has hung

skulls on the cottonwoods, path by the creek
I walk every day. But soon I will return to our

bed and the dog, the Amazon packages, the dead
dahlias. We’ve been assigned to each other,

you said marriage was a one-way ticket
with no transfers, remember? That throng

of fantasies we shared, a plunder. You try
to teach me mortal lessons, I walk ahead

of you, believing I have no need of salvation.
But when I can’t open a jar or figure out why

my car won’t start, I immediately imagine
what life would be like as a widow. Things

seem so singular out here but then I see sheep
flocked, birds charging each other in the wide sky,

think how necessary it is to belong somewhere,
how I belong to you.

*

casualty

enough of blackbirds, bluebirds, sparrows, the pricey seeds
my husband fills feeders with, enough of the squirrels
and mice that eat them instead, enough of falling in love
and out, of what got us here, what will get us elsewhere,
enough of his leg, my back, lost friends, lost minds, enough
of me me me poor me, the dead mother, the never-enough
girl, our country ‘tis of thee, purple mountains and fruited
plains, graphs and shootings, rising seas and men in suits,
stupid hope, confines of the body, murkiness of the soul,
forecasts of snow, detachment and prognosis, the night
between us, the absence of you.

*

Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor, and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominate seven times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, “The Glass is Already Broken,” from Blue Light Press.

From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” was published by Mango in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.

Breadwinner by Nancy K. Dobson

Breadwinner

Our last married winter I unwrap the good soaps,
Lemongrass, Cedarwood, and finally, Mint.
Inhaling the essence of each bar, I reimagine an aromatic feast
at our secondhand dinner table,
flash on a bouquet from a sunny mountain hike,
the perfume of a long flight home, me asleep on your shoulder,
or the tang of you in the doorway
after cleaning the gutters under lightning
in a raincoat and battered shoes.
Pale images that have dissipated
like a dried sachet in a dresser drawer.
I thumb through the day’s mail,
stack the bills under the first picture
I hung in our entry way,
a black and white line drawing of a heart
divided into tidy spaces and segments.
I study that geometric illusion and wonder
what I will do when I reach the center
of my own construction
and discover your scent has long since vanished.

*

Nancy K. Dobson’s writing, both fiction and poetry, has been published in a variety of publications including Madcap Review, Quince, Variety Pack, and more, and is forthcoming in Blue Moon Literary & Art Review. Her poetry has won a few prizes. A former teacher, she’s on Twitter @nancy_dobson.