goodbye to a friend by Alisha Kumar

Alisha Kumar is a junior in high school in Chicago. She writes poetry at 2 am, in the middle of storms, and when she’s home alone because, really, are there any better times?


goodbye to a friend

i brought a knife to a gunfight
you brought a quiver and a bow
(maybe we’re more alike than we think)
dark room, bloody walls, overdramatic
just the way you liked it, yeah?
the carnage invisible
to everyone but the fighters
(a battle with room for two)
my riposte against your poisoned arrows
i dealt in pain
but you deal in death.
does bleeding out
mean i was alive then?
that IT didn’t swallow me whole?
that i was still human?
you didn’t seem to think so.
(but i got the last word,
not that it matters.)

Electrified Feet by Gloria Buckley

Gloria R. Buckley has been published by Defiant Scribe, Academy of Heart and Mind, Chaleur Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, Red Hyacinth Journal, Sensations Magazine, Alcoholism Magazine, Chimera Magazine, Journal of English Language and Literature, Hermann Hesse Page Journal, Virginia Woolf Blog, Focus Magazine, Chimera Magazine and many other journals of poetry and prose. A self- published collection of seventy five poems is available on Amazon.com. She has a short story which will be published in October 2019 with Me First Magazine.

She is a practicing attorney for over thirty years. She holds a BA in English with honors and JD from Seton Hall. She has a Masters with Distinction in English Literature from Mercy College. She is enrolled in MA in writing program at Johns Hopkins University.


Electrified Feet

I felt the rumbling of emotions electrified down to my toes, igniting anger, fear and confusion as I stood planted on my father’s grave.  The trees, now forty years, had grown and leaned with age, as if maple leaves were weeping down above me.  His brother lay dying just doors down the road.  While a stranger occupied, nullified my childhood in my grandmother’s home.  My feet trembled as I marched along his grave to drive and gawk at the open window as my uncle laid almost to rest-alone with strangers.  Such is the Irish Catholic pride persecuting my mother because of divorce and remarriage to no less-a Jew.  Educated bigots banning me from what remained my father’s mother’s house-my grandmother.  What should have been a blood lineage to my brother and I-the only offspring and what truly was left of my father’s short-lived life.  Yet, no one cared-ever about us.

Vagabonds to a sixty’s revolution of mad men and women consumed in nicotine, scotch, little cash and too much time on a Saturday night.  Fights fueled by liquor and Librium.  Suicidal gases flowing from the kitchen oven where my father’s head laid to rest on the open door.  My mother’s frantic screams-a shroud of safety in all her insecurities beckoned me to unlock the handle.  It all seemed like a slow-motion sequence of clips.  Reel to slow reel as they lifted him up and out.  Why couldn’t he be strong, be a father, someone with a sense and fluidity of language?  Instead of the silent corpse his remains always a scalpel of silence slashed against my heart.

Daytime Fireflies by Sydney Smith

A Jill-of-all-trades (master of one: disco dancing), Sydney Smith has published poems and biophysics research. Suffering from FOMO, she studied both physics and philosophy. Nature’s mystique inspires her to share science through storytelling. She can be reached at sydneylynsmith@gmail.com

She can be reached at sydneylynsmith@gmail.com


Daytime Fireflies

The hike down to the waterfall is as slippery
as buttered corn on the cob with a few bites missing.
A throaty shhhh warns of the bubbly white horizon,
and audible power seeps into open ears, taking residence
in the space once occupied by meditations on balance.
But it is the daytime fireflies who enchant.
I mean the ones birthed as jutting rocks cut
the falls open, spurting the fireflies into life.
Into a chaotic descent, a quantization of the waterfall
whose whole flow, in turn, smooths the rocks.
We each help form the world in which we live
as we spin our webs ‘til they catch,
our individual souls forged by our own falls.
And, you know, the daytime fireflies
look like they’re having so much fun
it almost makes you want to jump with them.

She Owned a Restaurant up in Bend by James Kelly

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA), Edify (Helena, AL) and Flash Fiction have all featured one or more of his stories.


She Owned a Restaurant Up in Bend

“Ever see a hanging Ernie?”  Jack asked.

“Yep, my folks took me to one in Jacksonville,” Ernie said.

“I was about nine or ten. Spent the night, had a picnic.

‘I expect this will teach me a valuable lesson,’ was the feller’s last words.’ Ernie said.

“I don’t remember what he did,” Ernie said.

“Ernie did you ever see a Grizzly bear?”  Jack asked.

“Nope, they was all kilt out by my time.”  Ernie said, “Knew an old’ timer from Jacksonville that had been mauled by a grizzly bear, he said he was out with three fellers and he got attacked. The bear bit on him, and bit on him, and bit on him, then he played dead and the bear went away. He said the other fellers found him and started haulin’ him back to town through the brush, but he just hurt too bad. ‘Fellers,’ he said, ‘jest lay me on top that there gray brush and leave me be—I’m a goner.’

“So, Ernie said, “they left him there for dead. He said he stayed there on top of the gray brush for a long time, then got to feelin’ better and walked back to town.” 

“How many whore houses were in Medford Ernie?”  Jack asked.

“Six! There was six whorehouses in Medford.”  Ernie said.

“Molly’s was my favorite.”  Ernie said. 

“Molly’s was right above the Hubbard Brothers Hardware store. I saw Molly about twenty-five years ago. She owned a restaurant up in Bend, still serving the public.”  Ernie said. 

“Were you born in this house Ernie?”  Jack asked.

“Nope, across the Highway next to the road that goes up the hill to the mine. We had a two-room house there. The mine started to pay, and my parents built this house closer to the barn and the river. This here house was built in 1900. I barely remember the other place. This is mostly where I’ve lived except for the War. Lonely since my wife died, had to stop driving last year. Mrs. Ownby, gets me anywhere I need to go. My daughter comes down once a year from Salem. What? Oh, yeah, I fished a lot in the summertime, limit on trout? Oh, it was a hundred back then. Lots of times I caught one-twenty-five!”

“What did you do in the Great war Ernie?  Jack asked.

“Machine gunner,” Ernie said.

“Mowed ’em down til they stopped comin’,” Ernie said.

“Ever climb Mt. Thielsen Ernie?”  Jack asked.

“Six times,” Ernie wheezed, from an abrupt old man kind of certainty, and then he held up one hand with fingers extended and an upward thumb from the other hand to only waist height, and then let them down in an exhaustion of age.

“Last time was 1975,” Ernie said, looking off the precipice of his front porch, “I was 79.”

‘Rooms’ and ‘Windows’ by Donna Pucciani

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, taught English for many years before retiring to write full time. She enjoys travelling, genealogy, reading, and learning Italian in order to speak to and correspond with her newly-discovered cousins in Bergamo. Her latest book of poetry is EDGES.


Rooms

The old floorboards creak
with life after life.

Parquet lies deep in thought,
echoing footfalls

in a house of few rooms.
Strife and merriment,

imprisoned in small spaces,
emerge in golden afternoons,

filtering the oncoming dusk,
welcoming fireflies and bats.

Bedroom nights catch
a corner of the moon

in the shaved sunlight
of winter mornings.


Windows

Something about walls
demands space

for distant vision—sky,
cloud, and the light silence

of dragonflies in sunlit noons.
My Italian grandmother

used to lean on the windowsill,
looking down on the streets

of West New York, waiting for cars,
watching mothers walk to market,

their children lagging behind,
clutching chalk for hopscotch.

She knew that out there
was a world beyond

mothballed linens, iron bedsteads,
scrubbed linoleum, plaster saints,

and pasta al dente. I lift my head
above my books to watch

the ever-shifting horizon,
to view something beyond

word and desk, far from
the syllables I’ve sought since youth,

seeking the dappled truth of fog,
the untranslatable language of rain.

When the People Find They Can Vote Themselves Money, It Will Herald the End of the Republic by Andy Betz

Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 30 years. His novel, short stories, and poems are works still defining his style. He lives in 1974, has been married for 27 years, and collects occupations (the current tally is 100). His works are found everywhere a search engine operates.

My term, the “Franklin Smirk” will go viral once it is read. Bank on it.


When the People Find They Can Vote Themselves Money, It Will Herald the End of the Republic

Benjamin Franklin sat comfortably in the gas chamber. Perhaps he remained calm because he did not have his bifocals on. Perhaps he did not witness the demise of Jefferson yesterday. I believe he knew what Samuel Adams had planned.

Samuel Adams always had a plan.

I saw that smirk that so annoyed Franklin’s judge. The curl of that “Founding Father’s” lips spoke volumes. It was an “I know more than you do” look so many of the newly appointed judges hated to see in their hastily improvised courts. Having so many of the King’s subjects, actually seeing that smirk, during the 10-minute show trial annoyed even him more.

“Benjamin!” It was enough to bring Judge Rollin’s court to order and insult the defendant one last time.

Judge Rollin should have been used to receiving less than expected by now.

Last year, during the reparations portion of the armistice, General Rollin finally received his ballot approved lump-sum payment against the Old Republic and invested heavily in the “Temporal Initiative” to rid the Kingdom of the memory of those “American Revolutionaries” of yore. To General Rollin (who also purchased his new position of Judge in the King’s court) the founding fathers were an impediment to the progress he, and the other new judges, was making toward writing a new history for the new future. By bringing each one forward, informing each of their conviction, and then executing each, the “Temporal Initiative” would leave the King’s subjects hungry, in the intellectual and moral void, for a purpose, a purpose only Judge Rollin would supply.

I knew all of this. From the execution of Jefferson, how could I forget?

And still Franklin smirked.

The time was nigh and Judge Rollin was impatient. The crowd of “official” witnesses grew weary with each passing moment. The door of the gas chamber closed and I saw Benjamin Franklin for the last time.  I could not bear to see a repeat of Jefferson’s horrific death.

So I left before the cyanide pill dropped.

In a mere 1 hour later, Benjamin Franklin made his first news conference, interrupting the King’s speech, hijacking the King’s own broadcast monopoly, to quote and honor the memory of Mark Twain (executed three days prior).

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Apparently, Mr. Franklin knew the cyanide pill would not fill the gas chamber with hydrogen cyanide gas, but the entirety of the witness gallery instead. By remaining in the chamber, he would be unexposed to the effects of the toxin. Judge Rollin and the elite members of the “Temporal Initiative” died an equally horrible death to that of Thomas Jefferson.

That Franklin Smirk, as it became to be known, was according to Samuel Adam’s plan.

And Samuel Adams always had a plan.

Tennyson Probably Never Had Pink Eye and Two More by Richard LeDue

Richard LeDue currently lives and teaches in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada, where the winter nights are long and cold. This is why he writes so much poetry in the winter months, but he also hates the heat, so the summer months also prove productive. It is almost a guarantee that any of his work that speaks of nature is based on pure hearsay.


Tennyson Probably Never Had Pink Eye

They want aspiring poet laureates,
not a guy who writes about squirrels
in his garbage cans, and can’t figure out
how to potty train his four year old
autistic son. They want someone
who won’t forget to wear gloves
every-time those same squirrels eat
around old diapers, or who’ll
remember to wash his hands
before removing his contact lenses.


Brothers and Sisters

Abandoned among tall grass,
he panics,
runs so hard that the tomato soup
from lunch jumps up his throat,
burns away his fear,
leaves only anger,
while his older sister laughs-
all part of an ancient game
that no one bothered to give a name.


Statement of Claim

How much flesh has been sold
in these grocery coolers?
Written in black Comic Sans,
a blood red sign exclaims
that the veal is sold out
again
next to pre-cooked chicken,
long dead in a box.
Even produce section stinks
of pesticides-
I want a refund for a life
dependent on buying food like this.

Interval by Nicole E. Beck

Nicole E. Beck has worked various stints as a bank teller, an office drudge, and a retail bookseller, while completing a bachelor’s in filmmaking and art history. She likes history, museums, and long poems.


Interval

     His motel room overlooked a patch of grass, a dumpster and the divided highway, seen from the second floor. He heard the bathroom faucet drip. Propping himself up, he noticed a pair of loafers on the other side of the bed. Dirty socks stuffed inside them. His toes wiggled in his own sneakers, and he got up carefully. Under the armchair he discovered sunglasses. On the seat was a plastic grocery bag containing three red shirts, men’s button-downs, neatly folded. In the bathroom, he turned off the faucet and stumbled against an orange cooler. He took a breath and opened it. The inside was dry and empty.

     He lay on his stomach but sleep evaded him. He aspired to be tenuous, ignored, unreal. It was a puzzle to him why anyone bothered speaking.  He got up and tried on one of the shirts. It fit too tight across his chest. His wrists stuck out beyond the cuff. Looking at his reflection in the window, with his t-shirt sagging under the red button-up, he noticed the stitching on the hem was unraveling. And the red shirt, though fine in all other respects, had one broken button. As he plucked and worried the rough plastic edge a laugh escaped him.

     Someone rapped on the door, three light furtive taps. He checked the lock and chain and then for good measure pulled closed the musty curtains.  At this point seeing the other face was unthinkable, not even a possibility. In a fit of perversity he pulled on the sweat-stiffened socks. A barrage of louder knocks spurred him to slip on the loafers instead of his own shoes. He had been granted this and he was ready to assume ownership of the orange cooler.

     The knocking increased to pounding as he stepped in front of the bathroom mirror. He thought this time he’d find out how long his solitude could stretch. The battering continued as he polished the sunglasses on his shirt, and after twelve hours silence conquered, winning back the room. He took a celebratory trip down the hall, passed the closed blank faces of doors.

Three Poems by John Grey

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie Review and failbetter.


Battleground

Once a poetic feeling takes hold
words get a good going over.

In prose,
they are merely inconvenienced.
With poetry,
words ache, they suffer, they bleed,
and they never forgive you.


The Bruise

Bruise didn’t heal,
just became one with the skin.

So there could be no forgetting.
Not with the past so visible.

Even forgiving didn’t have it easy.
Regrets poured out of him.
Even un-manly tears.

And love remained twice-removed –
a fist,
a harrowing pain,
stood in the way.

And yet
they kept on living together.

That bruise had
no place else to go.


The Redemption of Amy

She was no longer from Arizona,
nor California either.
She was no longer from anywhere.

And she wasn’t waitressing,
slapping guys who got too fresh,
cleaning up their mess.

Nor was she listening to people
warning her to stop taking that stuff,
flush it down the toilet.

And she didn’t need money
to pay the back-rent
or the payday lender on Broad Street.

She had no one to call
to explain or apologize
or make her excuses.

And the threats stopped,
the criticisms faded,
the despair put an end to itself.

She was just a body on a bed.
In her twenty something years,
the only one of its kind.

The Greater Good by Julia Gaughan

Julia Gaughan writes from Lawrence, Kansas, where she lives with her family and books and cats and dog and from which she travels as much as possible. She can be found online through Medium and @julia_gaughan on Twitter. 


The Greater Good

You know that saying about if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day but if you teach a man to fish, he’ll feed himself until the corporations kill all the fish through pollution or unsustainable farming practices and he’ll die because of the lack of universal healthcare to treat his mercury-poisoned blood?

It doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

You know that saying about how a penny saved is a penny earned even though that penny saved doesn’t feed your crying children or pay for your prescription or put the gas in your car to get to your job that only gives you a raise when the minimum wage goes up and can’t earn any interest when it’s just helping stem the tide of overdrafts?

But has anyone tried professional football?