My father showed me.

How to eat a

Watermelon

In the new country.

The first step was a cut

Clean down the middle.

Then a spoonful of excitement

Of a rare, tasty treat.

Then we carved out the inside

Piece by piece.

Until its shell remained

For dinner

Where it was boiled and cut

Diced to feed

Three once more.

The first bite was thoroughly

Bland and bitter.

A taste that left me longing

For the day that would come

When he brings home a

Watermelon

We eat only once.

Peter Chengming Zhang is a Chinese Canadian hospital pharmacist, technology professional, and writer. His works have appeared in national news outlets in Canada such as the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Outside of his academic and professional interests, he enjoys writing poetry and short memoirs. Follow his works on his website: peterczhang.com

   
The Covid wreaked its havoc upon mankind. Face masks were required for everyone  now but the widow Mrs. Cornelia O’Connor had gotten her Irish up and refused to wear one.

    “You sure you don’t want me to get some masks for you when I’m out,” Nicole, her next door neighbor in the apartment complex, asked her. “You should wear one all the time like I do.”

     “Ya mean like you do when you’re having loud muffled sex with your masked boyfriend.”

    Nicole ignored that remark but she didn’t give up trying to save Mrs. O’Connor.

    “The Covid and all its variances have gotten even worse, Mrs. O’Connor. Booster shots are required every four months now ya know.”

      “I don’t care if they’re required every day, I ain’t getting one.”

      “You have to get one, it’s a way of life now.”

      “You mean like farming, alcoholism, and drug addiction. I swear Nicole that if you don’t take that mask off every once and a while it’ll grow right into your face.”

     Nicole never took it off, not even when she was having loud muffled sex with her boyfriend, who always wore one too.

    Now despite mankind’s attempts to crush the Covid, Mother Nature took her own course and Mrs. O’Connor picked up on it.

    “Looks like that mask of yours has grown right into your face Nicole. You better have it checked out.”

    “I already did and the doctor said that was perfectly normal. That my body was growing its own immune system. That skin would eventually grow a flap over my nose and mouth protecting me.  Said it was something called ‘evolution’. Whatever that is?”

      Now Nicole wasn’t the brightest bulb that had ever been screwed into a socket but the mask did prevent her from getting the Covid. It didn’t protect her however from getting pregnant, though she thought it would.  She showed Mrs. O’Connor her  baby.

    “What’s this?” Mrs. O’Connor asked her,  “Looks like your baby  was born with her own built-in flesh mask.”

     “She was. All the babies are being born that way now the doctor said. It’s that thing called evolution. Whatever that is.”

Author is a retired attorney who started writing for something to do in his rusting years.

SKY TO EARTH
snowflakes lift us skyward
soften hearts, lighten feet
until we dance

FAT CHANCE
cat peers into sky
tracks the eagle circling wide
feline dreaming big

Liz Kornelsen is a prairie poet from Winnipeg MB, who draws inspiration to write and paint from nature. When not writing she can found hiking, skiing, gardening or losing track of time in an art gallery. Or hula hooping, a skill that delights, having eluded her in childhood.

The sudden arrival of mist behind your glasses told me you understood my
final act of love, the first in too long.
My hand on your forehead,
fingers through your gray whisps,
whispered assurance that you were loved,
a promise that we’d care for mom.

Your final words came later with energy from hospital juice,
a different kind of message, one more typical of our past.
A reminder of prized guns in storage,
a complaint that grandpa’s revolver remained hidden,
a cheeky jab at mom for the hiding,
an undirected sigh.

Two languages,
Two messages of love.

Joel Predd lives Pittsburgh with his wife, two kids, and their adopted pit bull Olive.

“Four… Three… Two… One… Ready or not. Here I come.”

It was another instance of hide-and-seek, a game children like to play the world over. But children are not the only ones. Rats, too, enjoy it. Even adult brown rats – sometimes known as common rats or Norway rats – such as Ed, Fred, Brutus, and Rattus. They were in an alleyway somewhere northeast of Philadelphia that Wednesday morning. Rattus was ‘It”. He took his paws away from his beady eyes and blinked in the filthy dimness by the dumpster.

Where were they? Certainly not in the street with all the busy, human, pedestrian traffic. After an hour of investigating each dark shadow, empty can, and discarded Styrofoam cup, Rattus was still alone.

“Ed? Fred?” His plaintive words seemed to echo in the dead-end alley.

Rats are social animals, so nothing is worse for them than to be alone.

Had the others gone underground? Were they with the dirty sewer rats?

“Ed? Fred?”

Where they in some cheap restaurant kitchen? Or a pawn shop basement, cowering by a damp wall?

Had the three finally abandoned him? Ed and Fred, perhaps.

“And you, too, Brutus?”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

What you say goes.
Where it goes, no one knows.
Lighting gas, blowing smoke—
rarefied air never felt so remote.
Well, like associated costs,
living equals loss.

The trick is in the treatment,
stitched up.

Budding conniptions
tremble at the thought—
chickens little,
trampled at the trough.

Charles Brand is a certified educator of incarcerated and at-risk youth in Florida. He enjoys using any spare time and inspiration in the pursuit of impactful writing. Holding a master’s degree in western history, he is motivated to blend formal and informal skills in creative writing to attract readers who wish for more from the printed word.

Crude manner
met brute fact, et tu…

And on cue, the safety net snags
the choicest cuts
and lowest lots—
a pillar assault to the senses.

Surge breaches station;
gesture harbors germ.
Trappings set the hook, in vise,
caste out.

All’s swell that ends.

Charles Brand is a certified educator of incarcerated and at-risk youth in Florida. He enjoys using any spare time and inspiration in the pursuit of impactful writing. Holding a master’s degree in western history, he is motivated to blend formal and informal skills in creative writing to attract readers who wish for more from the printed word.

I will come to rest under the red oak,
In the shade at the end of the dirt road.
Between the corn and the factory folk,
They saved me a place according to code.
I have washed these stones with soap and water,
Stopping to trace the names with my finger.
I have been away yet still they offer
To let me lie with them here and linger.
Who will remember the name you carried?
Blood will run and dry but never transgress
Upon the ground where its past is buried.
Their offer is order, my answer yes—
When the harvest returns with the reaper,
Lay me down and let me be the keeper.

Eric Beidel has written hundreds of poems, stories, and essays he kept private until now. He has worked as a reporter, night janitor, editor-for-hire, speechwriter, and bureaucrat. He still uses pencils and the hand-me-down typewriter he got when he was 12. A native Midwesterner, Eric now lives in the shadow of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona, where he watches baseball and sunsets.

From behind their protected positions, the chief and his men fired. Then Rocco blasted back from the warehouse. The police let loose again. As the dust settled, Rocco was still alive and fighting. The warehouse was a disaster, at least the ground floor, its windows shattered, its walls pockmarked by bullet holes.

“Throw down your weapons and come out.” That was the chief.

“You’ll never take me alive.” Rocco was defiant.

“I can’t hear you.”

“ALIVE. I SAID, YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME.”

Lying among the glass shards on the concrete floor, Rocco fired twice through the window.

“Come out with your hands up.”

“I TOLD YOU. YOU’RE NOT TAKING ME ALIVE.”

Although struck in the left shoulder and right ankle, he was defiant.

“Who said anything about alive?”

For a moment, it seemed like any other day at the warehouse on N. Fruman St., except for the dust, the debris, the discarded bullet casings, and police squatting behind cars, dumpsters, and other protection. Some days, there was actually more debris and dust. Why so many felons like Rocco chose to shoot it out on N. Fruman was something the chief could never figure.

“Enough. Come out.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Rocco was confused.

“You don’t have to  scream. I can hear you better now. Just keep your hands above your head as you go through the door.”

“I told you, you’re not taking me alive.”

“I heard you. And we’re not going to, Rocco. Just make it easier all around so we can plug you as you come out with your hands up.”

“Huh?”

“The men are sick of taking in guys like you.”

“You’re supposed to do that.”

“They’re tired of it, week after week, standoff after standoff. So they took a vote and decided to just shoot you as you come out. You said yourself you won’t be taken alive.”

Rocco was more confused. He had said that. He had almost no ammunition left. Also, a ham sandwich, the only food he had, was full of glass and bits of warehouse siding.

“Does Judge O’Neill, who sent me to prison for five years, know about this?”

“Judge O’Neill? It was his idea that we vote on it, Rocco.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record)

I find her in back, mid-game
around the table, playing
two cards at once.

O-9, N-17, G-46…
Mini packets of Cracker Jack
are today’s prize. She has won

three already. Her sweet tooth, suppressed
for decades, now thrives on jelly beans
and ice cream. She doesn’t remember

it’s junk we don’t eat in this house.
As cards are called… B-29. I-43. N-17…
she full-on concentrates. Not long ago,

when invited to play, she had sneered,
For losers. It was awful
when, between reading the Times,

completing the Sunday crossword
and discussing politics, she could still track
her memory loss, could still reflect

on her own mind. Now, like the child
she never allowed herself to be, she thrills
over a complete row of plastic coins.

It should break my heart. But
it’s so much easier to love her
this way.

Lynn Cohen’s novel, A Terrible Case of Beauty, was published by Trebol Press in 2013. She received a Best of the Net nomination from Apricity Magazine in 2023. Lynn has attended various writing conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Columbia University Summer Writers’ Workshop. After a brief tenure in the Jerusalem Symphony Radio Orchestra, Lynn received a Bachelors in Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, concentrating in double bass performance.