Tag: prose poetry

Using by Howie Good

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Using

I pulled her aside one day after class and asked if she was okay. I was sure she was using. Her skin was ashen. There were alarming dark hollows under her eyes. She was so emaciated she looked like one of the living skeletons in a photograph of concentration camp victims. She thanked me for my concern but said she was already in treatment. The next week, she was found dead on the floor of her dorm room. My first thought was that she had overdosed. I later heard it was her heart. Chronic anorexia had fatally compromised it. Every life is a card dealt face down.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

Three Poems by Mark Hendrickson

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Mindful

My therapist says I should light a candle. So I light two, equidistant on the windowsill, four if I count the reflections. It is not enough. I add a stick of incense. She says I should choose calming scents; but lavender and chamomile gag me, so I go with bergamot. I imagine the smoke is steam rising and that life is Earl Grey. The tea grows cold too quickly. Outside my window it’s still raining, also grey. Someone in the apartments across the way is watching me watch them. My therapist says be mindful. I imagine the end of everything.

* 

People Like That

I don’t like people who are too loud. People that don’t pay attention to their surroundings. Angry people who only see the negative side of everything. I despise it when someone is manic one minute and depressed the next. I don’t care for bald people or those who work out all the time and still don’t lose weight. I have no time for intolerant people. I can’t stand introverts or anyone who can’t manage simple small talk without making it awkward. I don’t like people who take pills just to get through the day. No, I don’t like myself at all.

* 

The Leaving

Father drops your hand and shames you into leaving childhood. Voluntarily. ‘Big boys don’t carry security blankets.’ This was never true. Innocence was a home you couldn’t wait to run away from. It remains fashionable to claim you miss it. Then came parents. Friends. Lovers. You left them before they left you. You leave all you were willing to die for. You scream regret to the car in the garage. Soon you will circle round to innocence and childhood again. They will drag you from your home and leave you nowhere. Strangers fail to notice when you leave yourself behind.

*

Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work appears in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit markhendricksonpoetry.com

A Monster of Correction by William Doreski

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A Monster of Correction

No one knew how Aunt Alice got into our family. With her starry blue gaze and stilted posture she looked like a refugee from some tiny, impoverished European state. She moved into our apartment with a fat leather bag and an armful of books from Goodwill’s dusty shelves. The first night, when Carole served pigs’ feet and artichokes, Aunt Alice proved to be a monster of correction. Pigs’ feet should be boiled, not roasted. Artichokes go better with beef. Our dining room looks dingy. We should repaint it a delicate shade of yellow. Carole’s apron looks old-fashioned. Your hair sticks up funny. We went to bed early that night, leaving Aunt Alice complaining on the phone to a stranger she had randomly dialed. Days passed. Nights passed. The monster of correction corrected everyone we knew. She told Calvin he talked oddly. She ordered Melinda to wear longer skirts and stop showing her stuff. She told the Unitarian preacher that his God was a wimp and needed elocution lessons. She even tried to correct the sloppy eating habits of our cats, but they ignored her. Carole and I couldn’t ignore her. Aunt Alice had a voice of flint on steel. She sparked when she spoke, and several times almost set the place on fire. Finally we asked her to leave. Her response was to stretch out on the sofa and die. She was clutching a sheet of paper with instructions for the disposal of her carcass. She wanted to be cremated, and the urn with her ashes set on our mantle. Done and done. Now when that metallic voice creaks in the dark we correct her by telling her no one can hear unless she speaks up.

*

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is No Vacancy (2025). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Moving Objects by Marc Frazier

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Moving Objects

How can I be so inappropriate? I think riding the Green Line to my therapist Simon’s office. At a writers’ conference I had unleashed my rage at a staff member. The director of the conference gave me an official warning like I was a three-year-old: if I didn’t behave, I would have to leave. What causes my rudeness? It’s easy to blame chemistry, genetics, or my parents’ upbringing for things. We have pretty much ruled out brain damage and other odd and sundry neurological disorders like Oliver Sacks wrote about. I didn’t mistake my wife for a hat. Simon rarely, if ever, buys my theories. But I guess that’s what I pay him for. I’m just blunt like my parents. Then it hits me: my mother had recently died and my anger could have been at anyone. I missed her. I always leave therapy thinking of what people say at the end of AA meetings: Keep Coming Back. Going home, I take stock of my fellow el passengers. Whenever I do this kind of people scanning, a Joni Mitchell line rattles in my head: A thunderhead of judgment was gathering in my gaze. Sometimes I forget where I’m going. Sometimes I wonder how these trains move so fast considering the weight we carry inside—sufficient to throw off something in the universe.

*

Marc Frazier has published poetry in nearly a hundred fifty journals. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” His four books are available online. Marc has also published memoir pieces, photographs, essays, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association contest. Marc, an LGBTQ author in Fort Lauderdale can be found on his website marcfrazierwrites.com. X @marcfrazier45, Insta mcfj45.

Anticipatory grief by Lyanne Wang

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Anticipatory grief

My chest readies. I no longer know if it’s asthma, or the weather warming, again. I tap my fingers to count the years: the thumb slides back to the index. Five years, almost. Grief measures itself in cycles, and I steady my wishing by feeding the wild, wild spirals. The curl of her hair, rounding the noose. The circle of fireflies in the Minnesotan sky, where I had escaped in June. The way I count time, a winding path to August, and then, a straight line to Boston: 3,110 miles away, away until — April, the fifth since her death. I am waiting, now, in March. The moon is waning, as it always does. The grief, becoming, again.

*

Lyanne Wang is a writer based in the Bay Area and a poetry editor at Pithead Chapel.

Four Poems by Leila Abeni Jackson

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IN THE TIME OF GLASS CAPTIVES

Days were measured in indices of refraction. I woke with a fever and, inexplicably, bleeding toes, as though I had been dancing. An ocean of sweat, its tendrils the sheets. I ran a cold shower. Days were measured in millimeters thick. It started with a watchtower, a bottomless brunch, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Around me, people were eating and regurgitating and so I did the same. They spoke of faceless men, palm trees, salt flats. Days were measured in relative efficiency. They piled their plates high and I thought of Kilimanjaro. I excused myself to the bathroom, sweaty and hotcold. When I looked in the mirror, I had a fly’s thousandfold eyes, each surface its own wide and wriggling creature. In the time of glass captives, days were measured in ghosts, in depth of stomach, in eighty-five seconds to midnight. Back at the table, Guantanamo was old news. They were discussing sponsorships and calling for more mimosas. I saw peristalsis thousandfold, villi swaying tirelessly like kelp forests. Like a snake, something in me unhinged its jaw for more.

*

MANY SMALL CRESCENDOS

I was born with my eyes wide open, milky and dark, or so the story goes. In this way, I took the minutes. I bet on black. They shot her in the middle of a busy street, the sun washing its chyme out of her hair, touching her mouth like it intended to climb inside. She spoke charitably about it afterwards: I would tell young girls to follow their dreams, that you can do anything you set your mind to. Magnified and scraping the sky, lips parted. There were clothes, but there weren’t. There were faces, but not really. The next day I went to the body shop. Really, I didn’t know better. I wanted to see it for myself: whose hand, whose cheek, whose swath of knee, which small crescendos went where. They shimmered in the low light. Some of them grew legs. In that moment, it was just somebody’s horrifying basement, some collagist gifting my face to a new naked body. My same forehead. My new hands. It was the same but it was different. Every day the same liver, every night a new vulture. It was a thunderstorm stealing my face, she said, rolling over my body. But it wasn’t real, and anyway, it happens to everyone. You get over it; you move on. This was the radio on a Sunday afternoon, while I was washing the sun’s vomit out of my favorite skin. Supposedly they shot her on a balcony, back to the stars, Venus peeking out from behind her neck like an earring. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. In this way, I took note. I bet on black. The Milky Way beheld us wide open, or so the story goes. I wouldn’t know; I closed my eyes.

*

PULMONARY EMBOLISM

How a bubble in a hose can kill the diver to whom it rushes
To deliver its gifts. How sometimes pain is mistaken
For progress. How I, thinking I would not wake, woke—
Flushed with cold and pressed to a stranger, who said,
With no mouth, you could have died. I chose to take it
As a welcome back, then changed my mind and went with
A simple hello. Until then, I’d had recurring dreams about
This waking up. The curious business of being rearranged
With my eyes closed, like a repeated loser of the shell game,
Never guessing which one hides the stone. It seemed too
Simple to be true—I lived, and so I won—when really,
I’d guessed wrong again and had no idea where the stone
Had hidden itself away. It was too soon to tell, they said,
Whether it was in fact out of my lungs, or whether it was
Giggling somewhere I’d forgotten to check, a hidey-hole
I’d thought was out-of-bounds. I had recurring dreams
About guessing wrong again, though at each moment
You were there to find the right shell, squirreled away.
Oh, love. How I’d laughed with you, felt the air shoot
Up and out, bellies pressed together like rounded drums
When meanwhile, up north, that stray dog in all its
Ravenous beauty scavenged for the most comfortable
Front porch it could find, and my lungs, ever the hosts,
Opened the back door wide.

*

THE TESTAMENT OF ANARCHA

                 I
Shuffled first by my boy—at least I thought
he was a boy, because I once heard
that boys sit higher up—he shuffled me then ran,
giggling, to some light-dark place I knew
I could not follow. After the second day of pushing,
they whispered, she might die, and I thought, good.
I could hold his hand on the way there.
Maybe there would be music.
Shuffled a second time by the doctor,
though he looked more like a grave-robber
to me. Couldn’t imagine what he was possibly doing
except robbing the grave of my grave.
Didn’t stop the blood or the whatever else,
but may have made something entirely new.
Not a child but a monster. He said
you are loathsome, disgusting.
The girls whispered—they said this monster
has thirty faces and all of them are cold
with metal teeth here to chew me up
from the inside. The girls held me down.
I was shuffled twenty-nine more times
and they held my shoulders, my hair,
stuffed a sand-white rag between my teeth
so that I could not speak or scream.
Was it normal? To sweat this much?
Was it normal not to know four years had passed
and yet know I was still loathsome, disgusting?
Littered with debris like some stray animal,
I had long ago accepted that this was hell.
Some days I was a tilled field,
others an axed tree. Often I was the moon,
waiting to be plucked from the sky
by the next steel trap. The girls were all my age.
Sometimes I wondered if their sons ever giggled at them
from behind a light-dark veil every night.
Though we weren’t friends, they wiped my sweat.
Sometimes they cupped my face, like mothers.

                 II
I woke engulfed in tongues of sand, swathed
carefully like a newborn. There was music.

A hundred hands touching me—not to stuff rags between
my lips, but to gently carry away the sobs and spit

born there. An old woman lay on my left, a stranger
whose name I somehow knew, her brown skin sagging

and flaking from its home like paper. She held my hand.
The women whisper-chatted amongst themselves,

breasts all bared like new mothers who had forgotten
their shame. They helped me to my feet, bathed

me in the surf until I stopped saying loathsome, disgusting,
until I forgot the shape of the words in my mouth.

There was music. There were hands in my hair,
teasing it into shapes. I thought there would be fire, I said.

The women laughed, as a bird laughs when staring down a rifle:
as though carrying the knowledge that only a chosen few are blessed

with flight. I had no pain, and whether or not I had scars
didn’t seem to matter. My dead skin snowed off in sheets

below the buttery and unplucked moon. I did not tell them
that I had met the Devil, the endless hollowings,

the deaths of all I’d never owned. I didn’t have to.
They already knew. When I held still, there was music.

*

~ Author’s Notes ~

“In the Time of Glass Captives” is after Evan Antonakes’ “Crack”.

“Many Small Crescendoes” is dedicated to the increasing number of women who, due to advances in artificial intelligence, have had their face and likeness used without their consent. AI pornography is a deeply violating reality. Like other concerns addressed in this collection, it robs people of ownership over their bodies.

“The Testament of Anarcha” pays homage to Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who underwent over thirty gynecological surgeries without anaesthesia to treat her vaginal fistula and to serve as a test subject for research in the field. Her tormentor, J. Marion Sims, is still honored today as the “father of gynecology”. In his autobiography, he repeatedly describes her body as “loathsome” and “disgusting”.

*

Leila Abeni Jackson is a proud DC native and a Pushcart-nominated Harvard undergraduate studying English and History of Science. Her work appears in the Harvard Advocate, Rattle, Sixteen Rivers Press, and elsewhere. She is the former poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate and her most recent work includes her senior thesis, Uncharted Song, a poetry collection which explores Blackness and the medical body through time.

Two Poems by Rebecca Aronson

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On Working in My Son’s Room After He Has Moved Out

What does it mean that the only art you’d allow in your room is a tiny painting that blends with the blue walls, a portal through which to see two silver-haloed planets and a droplet of a moon in a star-splattered, velvety sky? They are not like earth, nor unlike earth exactly, just as the blue of this room is nothing like and very like a certain kind of sky. It’s not, I don’t think, that you dislike art in general, but you don’t like to be pinned to a single idea. There’s a book of logic puzzles on the shelf we always used to wonder at. Planets are to identity as paint is to fish. No. Space is to color as the roses blooming outside your window are to the tiny eye of a praying mantis. No? I always use wrapping paper printed with stars for your gifts. I’ve given you cards that unfold to reveal a three-dimensional paper ship, a bedspread that looks like an unmown field. That is to say, I have wanted to give you the world, but since it has never been mine to give I bought you a small portrait of imaginary planets someone else’s child painted, and hung it on your blue walls, which were not the neon green you said you wanted, but this other color, different than either of us would have chosen, but beautiful, it turns out, in all the kinds of light we have here in this little room on earth.

*

Halloween snowstorm, Minneapolis, 1991

I remember that I didn’t know my neighbors
except the man across the hall with a kitten
he let wander our hallway. On the morning D called
at dawn muttering nonsense about angels and windows
I saw the city buried in snow, white sky, white mounds,
the streets whited out and everything as still
as a held breath. The kitten man and I went from floor
to floor and at every door asked what was needed
then took a wagon that someone had and struggled
into the new white-out world where everyone lived
now to help another. We worked in pairs and coteries
to dig out cars from beneath snowbanks, to carve paths
wide enough for one person to pass
between piles which were already starting to lose their brilliant shine,
we sculpted streets where memory said streets should be,
took turns following the shovelers with bags of sand
and cannisters of coarse salt. We took turns shoveling,
throwing the heavy stuff into mounds
that fattened and grew and sweated and froze slick again.
We dragged the wagon a few blocks that took all morning
to a store that was somehow open and bought whatever we could find
that was anything like what our neighbors wanted
and heaved the wagon back another hour along our own furrows
and up the mountain where the front steps used to be
and knocked again at all the doors on all the floors
to hand out all the not-quite-what-was-asked-for sundries
and went to our own doors exhausted, as happy
as I had ever been.

*

Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com

Ghosts of the American East by Jerry Wemple

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Ghosts of the American East

Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.

Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.

Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.

Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.

*

Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.

Two Poems by Ethan Mershon

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the stars

at the drive-in we were playing with decades, not like playing with fire,
but with what fire leaves behind. but there, in that tan van, we three
sat in the trunk with the door flung open over our heads, and fire played with me,
i wanted to kiss both of the girls i was with, although one had a long-distance boyfriend,
and the other was so christian it made my teeth hurt. i didn’t want a beer
i wanted eight beers and to turn back the clock. business as usual.
when the movie ended the christian girl drove us back to Grand Rapids
along a highway with no other cars on it. then she turned off the headlights.
we couldn’t see the road in front of us. we were alone in the world.
i was going to tell her to stop being crazy, to turn the lights back on,
suddenly i had a lot to live for, but then i looked out my window
and there they were.

*

seeker

i am standing in the back of a small church in Wichita,
son of a pastor, lapsed worship leader, holding
a styrofoam cup of coffee with the steam rising up
like i do when i go my anonymous meetings, and
the congregation is singing Amazing Grace, which
i haven’t heard in five years, which i once sung for
the inauguration of the president of my university,
who i didn’t like. the sum of the congregation’s voices
fills the chapel, pressing up against the stained glass
windows and the bread and grape juice at the front,
music getting in the body and the blood like a virus
or a crush, and i remember when me and my sisters
would sneak the communion bread away from the altar
after the service and eat it in the parking lot, children
who were so blessed they didn’t know they were blessed,
and as the song ends i feel like i should be crying,
but i’m not, i sit down among all these people i don’t
want to be friends with, and hope they have found
what they are looking for, because i will have to look
again.

*

Ethan Mershon is a poet living in Wichita, Kansas. His work has appeared in: Meridian, Fourth River, The Paris-American, and other journals.

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

The Translucent Mother by Lara Payne

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The Translucent Mother

That night I thought you were dead I didn’t think once about your ghost, or worry you would haunt me. Of all I did not do for you. Of all you did not do for me. The police used the photo I gave them, found you bloody toed and confused. The next day you told me you don’t know how you wandered for 12 hours, never once asking for help. Am I kind to strangers because of you and your illness? Your ease of disappearance. I suckled 6 weeks, you told me once, so you knew you’d never get cancer. I’m used to your magical thinking, and barely argued. To what point? Perhaps I don’t need to imagine your ghost, as your presence has always been a bit translucent. Easily blown by any wind. Your voice changing cadence with each new friend or love. Chameleon. My first love, my first loss. The person I try every day to both love and be nothing like. Mother, half gone. Mother disappeared.

*

Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle and online with SWWIM Daily.

Three Poems by Howie Good

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A Dog’s Life

What I remember happening probably didn’t happen quite as I remember it. I was only 4, maybe 5, playing with toy cars and trucks on the sidewalk. A stray dog – a big, brutish German shepherd mix – appeared out of nowhere. They say dogs can sense fear. That frightening dog sensed mine. It snarled from deep within its Nazi guard dog heritage and then snapped at my face. Everything went black. The next thing I remember is mom, a kid herself, scooping me up in her arms and staggering down the street covered in my blood. Time is a funny thing. Seventy years later, in the dark gray of a winter twilight, I pull against my collar, a dog on a chain.

*

Wedding Song

The most popular wedding song in the spring of 1973 was “We’ve Only Just Begun (White Lace and Promises)” by the brother-sister duo, The Carpenters. Its sentimental lyrics set to a simple melody appealed to both the soft of heart and the soft in the head. Our wedding song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Although we were young – just 21 – we were old enough to realize white lace can yellow and fray and promises be broken. Call it cosmic pessimism if you want; philosophers do. So much that exists exists in contradiction. The moon shines despite being barren rock, and in Alabama frozen embryos are considered children.

*

New World Order

It’s the belated end of the American Century. You can hear the slow, monotonous ticking of the cooling engine. A self-proclaimed king and his coterie of sociopaths have recast the culture in their own distorted image without so much as a “pardon me.” The lamp beside the golden door has been extinguished. Human bones are used in soups. Breathing is frequently a struggle. A fine black thread of anxiety runs through everything. I cope, but just barely, and only by exceeding the maximum daily recommended dosage. My face, with its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a signed confession. Some things are crimes even if the cops don’t have to be called.

*

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author. His latest poetry collection, True Crime, is due out in March from Sacred Parasite.

Two Poems by Howie Good

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Au Courant

Just because I smile doesn’t mean I am happy. “All of life,” Buddha said, “is sadness.” Birds return from the hot countries full of excited chatter, unaware the Doomsday Clock has crept even closer to midnight. I keep up with the headlines as much as a person can and still remain sane. Minds have corroded, splintered, flamed out. For every opinion shared in the blogosphere, there is an equal and opposite opinion. I hope for truth to recover its legendary authority. Meanwhile, a tomato is also a child’s balloon.

*

Shadows and Ghosts

The CT scan machine is shaped like a donut. I am lying inside the hole of the donut on my back. Bugs lie on their backs when they are dying. I was injected only moments earlier with a special dye. A burning sensation immediately spread through my body. Now the machine, with a brilliant flash of light, scans my torso for new tumors. In an adjacent room, techs are monitoring the images on a screen. They see shadows and ghosts. They see mounds of rubble. They see the screams trapped in my lungs.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry book, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Two Poems by John Amen

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Hide & Seek

I was the golden boy. I bolted for the woods, running through ferns, past the sycamores, hiding behind the well-shed. The birthday song faded, my parents boarded their boat, leaving for a new life across the ocean. When I emerged, I was no longer the golden boy & my friend, who was supposed to be looking for me, had given up, married, he had children, grandchildren, houses scattered across the globe. Our lawn had turned brown, the roof was heavy with moss, our driveway littered with mannequins & car parts. I watched the Uber driver as he hauled the roast into the cul de sac. I stabbed it with my Swiss army knife until it stopped howling. That red juice flowed across the pavement, neighborhood, the county. I waited for the moon to appear, but no one was working the strings, at least that day, & like a train that’s leapt its rails, the night just never arrived.

*

FMJ

It happened again by the diamond highway. A satyr wearing a Budweiser cap put a bullet through a windshield & disappeared into the sunlight. Police arrived, dogs sniffed the tarmac, detectives found a casing with an inscription that read love is salvation. The highway was barricaded, cars & trucks backed up to the Standalone Gulf. Someone said, we’re in a loop here & smiled a terrifying smile. The day of the funeral in Chicago / in Manhattan / in Omaha a million people flooded a Zoom call, chanting until the FBI wrapped a trailer in Musgrove, a kidnapped baby sobbing on the back porch. The satyr in the Budweiser cap sang “Amazing Grace” through a bullhorn, then turned himself in. At the trial, he waved his beautiful hooves, declaring he’d heard voices in the forsythia, his angels ordering him to spread the holy word. An hour later the judge lowered his gavel, a long sigh unrolled through the city. The satyr’s hind legs were chained, his horns pared to a nub. A bailiff dragged him from the courtroom, mane shimmering, teeth bared for the folks back home. Someone said that night & that night only, they could see every star in the universe.

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John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

1986 in a Small Town in Ohio by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

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1986 in a Small Town in Ohio
We cruised, riding around in someone’s older Civic, or borrowing a parent’s Impala, or taking the beater that was on the verge of breaking down or rattled or needed a muffler but why bother now? We drove by the home of every boy we liked. It never took us long, a mile to East Enon Road, a mile to Fairfield Pike, through the few neighborhoods—IGA Land, College streets, the houses near Ellis Pond. We cruised by Ha Ha’s Pizza and Ye Olde Trail Tavern but mostly by the arcade where boys let quarters fall out of their pockets, and sometimes we joined them but often we tired of playing Ms. Pac-Man and wanted something more, something else, and we drove to Young’s Jersey Dairy where they sold day-old donuts after midnight and we squeezed into those red vinyl booths, and the boys would be there, the girls would be there, and we would buy Diet Coke and stay out late and eat day-old anything and carry whatever this was into our futures, some of us leaving home and never coming back, some of us going to college and working summers at Glen Helen or Carol’s Kitchen or washing dishes at The Wind’s, some of us never going far in the first place. But before the future, it was boys we longed for, boys we wanted to notice us, boys we wanted to change our lives—so much happens and never once happens in a small town—and death would come early to two of us and shift all the trees on Mills Lawn and none of us would take Route 68 to Xenia at night anymore, yet we still thought we would always have more of them—these days that back then never sped up, only slowed down, and in all the years we cruised, we never spotted one boy we liked through any house or apartment window, but we talked for hours about what might happen if we did, and we rolled down windows and the smell of seasons blew into the car, and we knew it, all of it—what was and what never would be—and our imaginations ran ahead of the car and behind it as we held in our breath and sped toward the edge of town and tomorrow, turning up the radio, ready to arrive.
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Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic markers, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle. Learn more at shulycawood.com.

Artillery Shelling by Laura Daniels

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Artillery Shelling

The Picatinny Arsenal is an American military research and manufacturing facility located on 6,400 acres of land in Morris County, New Jersey, United States.
          —Public Relations Manager for Picatinny Arsenal, U.S. Military

“(the) Picatinny portfolio comprises nearly 90 percent of the Army’s lethality and all conventional ammunition for joint warfighters.” What the hell does this even mean? The website goes on to explain the type of products tested: IED defeat technologies; small, medium, and large caliber conventional ammunition; precision-guided munitions; mortars; fire control systems; small-arms weapon systems; howitzers; gunner protection armor; warheads; fuzes; insensitive munitions. This list of products adds to my confusion. I thought they only tested small ammunition. My home is five miles from Picatinny. My town sends out this email almost daily: Please note that Picatinny Arsenal will be blast testing today from 9 am-3:30 pm. Also note that testing is conducted in 8–10-minute intervals. The testing comes grouped as three blasts at a time: the first shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the second shell fires… Boom… then a short pause… the third shell fires… Boom… then an 8–10-minute interval until the next testing round begins. Testing—only testing—I remind myself—as the floor vibrates—and the windows rattle.

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Laura Daniels (she/her) is a multi-genre writer. Founder of the Facebook blog The Fringe 999 and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Curated recently in New Jersey Bards Anthology, Silver Birch Press, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Smarty Pants Magazine for Kids, and featured poet for Poetry for Mental Health. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is forthcoming in 2025. Her poems grow from a love of wandering and New Jersey, where she lives with her partner in Mt Arlington and works in the community garden. She can be reached at https://lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com and @thefringe999.

Anthropology 101 by Susana H. Case

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Anthropology 101

Our professor, red-eyed, disheveled, blew her nose, announced to the class that her good friend—lover, I thought—charged with murdering his wife, and without an alibi, had just been found not guilty. The verdict, the professor was adamant, forgotten ethnographic text in hand, restored her confidence in criminal justice. Students nodded, closed their notebooks, looked up again when she admitted her certainty that he’d done it. Something roiling in him, she told us, whenever he talked about his marriage. I believed she was right: he probably did do it, femicide having such an intimate face. She told us it was a good thing a jury had erred on the side of innocence. Then she brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. We opened our books to the Ituri forest people, how these short-statured men climb more than 100 feet into the canopy to collect honey from the bees, the product they most prize.

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Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023 and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, 2022. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and is forthcoming as an English-Ukrainian edition. Case is currently a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. susanahcase.com

Two Poems by Howie Good

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The Sincere Assassin

The world burned without being consumed. Other people were just shadows. I passed a woman on the street I only later realized might have once been somebody. God’s face would appear and then disappear and then reappear among drifting clouds, playing peek-a-boo with the abandoned babies shrieking on the ground. My phone rattled. I thought I was about to learn the secret of how clowns get inside very small cars in very large numbers. The message was that I had cancer.

                                                            &

Outside the entrance to the Cancer Center, a woman with pale, stringy hair and puffy eyes stands morosely contemplating her phone and smoking a cigarette. Inside, the chatter is all about a sincere assassin with a head like a Donatello angel’s. I’m enthralled and terrified when I catch sight of him stepping off the elevator into the main lobby, and while there’s no actual law against his presence, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a kind of crime. Only if you have ever seen for yourself his dark hands sparkle can you truly judge.

                                                            &

It’s hard to remember a time when I haven’t received radiation, lying face down and naked to the waist on a pallet and required to remain as still as a corpse while the massive appendages of a monstrously large and powerful X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, sweep invisible killing beams over me, and there’s nobody I can ask, “Who allowed this to happen? Who’s to blame?” but even if there was, they wouldn’t know, and I would submit to the cold ministrations of the machine anyway, my nothing life, for all its startling inconsequence, worth the anguish of living.

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Pilgrim’s Progress

At the far end of the street, I found the door I had been told would be there and passed through it. My bones crunched and rattled with each step, and my eyeballs bounced in their sockets. The ground itself began to dance. Gravestones fell over and smashed. The messiah appeared like a parade float overhead. Those who had once waited in expectation of his coming were gone by then, some grown tired and disaffected, but others made into lamp shades.

                                                            &

Deadly new diseases had emerged now that weather operated without regard to the season. Even souls had a kind of leaf blight. The overflow of corpses from funeral homes and cemeteries were stacked on sidewalks. And the dead were all so young. I almost cried out, “I don’t belong here, I don’t!” Special points of interest represented by triangles on tourist maps turned out to actually be just triangles.

                                                            &

When I arrived back home, no one was there, though the radio was playing in the kitchen, tuned to a classical music station, Glenn Gould interviewing Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould. Reminder notes were stuck to walls and doors and tucked in the frames of mirrors. “The weasels are not in the sky” was cryptically written on one. I climbed the stairs, undressed, and fell exhausted into bed. I may have slept or I may have just thought I did, drifting on the treacherous surface of a vast emptiness and everyone everywhere dying by their own hand.

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Howie Good’s newest book, Frowny Face, a synergistic mix of his prose poetry and handmade collages, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications.

Two Poems by Jennifer R. Edwards

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Watching Wolverine (Again) with my Second Husband

Only here, I admit I still double-take mildly muscular men in filthy wife-beater tank tops. I’m a sucker for dark, deep sideburns; those coursing creeks into a cool river mouth. Though I love a silver fox or shaved head hiding a historic hairline receding too soon, it’s the random spike that makes me want every angle of light. Cowlicks random & irreverent, the sheen of a day’s exhausting desire. Some consistent curiosity in me, watching, still & oblivious, as if every story loops to some evident ending. Those hands massive & metal glinting so beautifully unbroken. Not every story is chronological, but they’re linked & lovely with loneliness, the entering of an endless forest, a hardened man pushing back the gross overgrowth creeping along a barely visible path. There is something to be said for gravel-voiced men with animal instincts, finding me by impulse alone despite my awkward pains to cover every track. I’m there too, riding shotgun in an old, freezing car on a desolate shit-town road with a man saying you’re finally safe. I’m there asking what I should have, what I still need to know: when the claws come out, does it hurt? I still love him; how he answers like a can coming down, like a phone finding the wall, like the sun punishing the snow, saying every time. Oh, beautiful brawler, I thought there was heroism in desire. I confuse eagerness & appetite. Wanting won’t ever be enough. You don’t know your body is a weapon. Some genetic codes can’t be removed or rewired. Your healing is pure mutation.

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The Well-Published Writer Doing My Tarot Reading Says It’s Harvest Time
         For C.J. Hauser and my Colgate crew

What grows best is what lets me baby it. It’s true, I’m not good at pruning or reducing. Lately, I’m deducing it’s OK things leave me. I love what lets me clip & hover & rearrange & putter. I admit, I have favorites but it’s every individual person & plant & animal at some point. How is it something or someone knows you? The proof: three iconic pictures of wheat & judgment & a man with a wand & world on his back. She tells me to be kinder to myself & my work is in fruition though there’s more ahead. The third card is different & it’s true my attention wanes & maybe that’s the whole point. I don’t really get it. She can’t exactly summarize. The bountiful sun is limited but still full for its dwindling time. Lately, I wonder what won’t survive me; clipping plants two nodes up from the end because it helps the roots. Growth is always starting & startling. Anyone who says they don’t have favorites is lying. I was lying when I started this, thinking things grow because of what I give. It might always find its own simple stretch toward light.

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Jennifer R. Edwards (Unsymmetrical Body, Finishing Line Press, 2022) won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize. Her poems have received Pushcart nomination, support from Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Colgate Writers Conference, and appear in many anthologies and literary magazines recently including Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope Review, Passengers Journal, Terrain, Literary Mama, and Snapdragon. She’s a speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH, residing with her family and pug. Twitter @Jennife00420145, Instagram Jenedwards8 https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards

Two Prose Poems by Howie Good

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The Visitation

I heard a massive thump. Alarmed, I went to the sliding glass door and looked out, expecting to see a seagull lying there dead after crashing into the glass. Instead, a juvenile sand shark was flailing on the back deck. I couldn’t have been more astonished if I’d been visited by an angel clothed in light or a neighbor wearing no clothes at all. The shark was just a foot long and battleship gray. As it thrashed about, I called to my wife, “Barbara, quick, bring a bucket!” I half-filled the bucket from the hose. Then Barbara, using a gardening trowel, managed to drop the shark into the bucket. This is the world. Whatever the hour, there’s always a rendezvous going on.

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Murderers on Holiday

I was born with holes in me. “These things happen,” the doctor told my mom with a resigned smile. I can’t visualize the love of our fellow man that the Bible preaches with the detail that I can baseball on the radio. If there were actually angels, would they fly in a V-formation like geese, you think? Crows can hold a grudge for a year or more against someone who has mistreated them. No one should feel particularly safe. I love cats, but even a cat, when it’s starving, could eat a person.

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Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

ESP by Ed Nichols

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My friend said, “You need to be a believer in extrasensory
perception. I know things before they happen.” I cried into my
phone. “I don’t want to know the future. Or something that
happens on the other side of the world.”

I dozed off in my lawn chair. Not needing to know things
yet to happen. Blue sky lay over the farm. Cows munched
grass…dogs napped. Life was beautiful. Why question? Worry not
about such happenings…things to be determined tomorrow, or
next week, or next year, or never?

Smell of cornbread drifted over me. Understanding what I
am…what I believe, brought a tear to my one good eye. Always
best to not know when a terrible thing will occur.
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Ed Nichols lives on Lake Oconee, Georgia. He is a journalism graduate from the University of Georgia, and is an award-winning writer from Southeastern Writer’s Association. He has had many short stories published, online and in print. In 2020 he started publishing his prose poems. He is currently working on a collection of his southern short stories.