Catching Grasshoppers and other poems by Kristine Brown

On the weekends, Kristine Brown frequently wanders through historic neighborhoods, saying ‘Hello’ to most any cat she encounters. Some of these cats are found on her blog, Crumpled Paper Cranes (https://crumpledpapercranes.com). Her creative work can be found in Hobart, Sea Foam Mag, Philosophical Idiot, among others, and a collection of flash prose and poetry, Scraped Knees, was released in 2017 by Ugly Sapling.


Catching Grasshoppers

climbing trees
of a sleeping yesteryear.

this,
my favorite hobby.
catching grasshoppers
as they fought
from opposite sides.

a tennis court
with boundaries
set by chalk,
soft and washable.

like shirts you can say
I stole,
but no others I own
could pedal in tandem
with my only black cardigan
undoubtedly well.

I’ve never seen a dragonfly,
and snow is like pork
to babies of vegan love.

but its sole presence,
a decade not exactly halved.

I’m in doubt
of its capacity
to surpass the travels
of an earnest breath.


On Being Polite

verifiable addresses
and envelopes returned.
some days, you don’t know
exactly who to believe,
to whom you reveal
your most embarrassing moments.

taking a bite of mudpie,
thinking it’s chocolate mousse.

sums up my love life,
and his, and hers,
and theirs,
as they quarrel in plastic seats.
he took her out for crab legs,
but crustaceans make her bleed.
see, now that’s a problem.

but if she were to ask,
“Are we bothering you?”
and you vigorously shook
your scarlet chin, side to side.
you lied.
but the winces of those around,
these are simply tips
properly vetted.

they don’t unveil a scandal,
but dab with a tough cotton swab.

everyone cowers.

banana peels bruised.


Supervised Grocery Shopping

a proper meal
to satiate.

and words of a fullness
we taste in custard.

it’s enough to say “yes”
to unvested kayaking.

rapids, and rocks
to monopolize foam.

with each purchase,
a reluctant revisit.

as tangerines drop
from an overwhelmed bag.

Breakfast With Mom by Nicole Efford

Nicole Efford is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.


Breakfast with Mom

            Mara cracked two eggs and put bread in the toaster. “Mom,” she said to her mother, who was slumped over the kitchen table, “wake up.” She began to scramble the eggs, mumbling, “I can’t believe this. Couldn’t stay clean for even a week.”

Mara stepped toward the table, “Mom, get up.” She shook her mother, then took her cold hand. “Mom?”

Her mother’s ghost sat next to her body. “I was so unhappy, you had to understand,” the ghost said. Mara couldn’t hear her. Her mother’s ghost tried to wipe away her daughter’s tears, but they couldn’t feel each other.

The toaster popped up.

We Are Romanovs by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri

Mir-Yashar is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of two Honorable Mentions from Glimmer Train and has had work nominated for The Best Small Fictions. A self-proclaimed Big Lebowski devotee, he lives in Fort Collins and loves White Russians and listening to Tchaikovsky.


We Are Romanovs

My older sister Nancy and I declared ourselves Romanovs after Dad’s constant berating. I was too much of a dreamer, she was too much of a smart-aleck, foul-mouthed. We looked uncannily like Mother. Of course, Dad was a foul-mouthed drunk, a failed actor.

We became Romanovs, comported ourselves with grace. We confiscated Dad’s beer, issued edicts to Dad. Edicts demanding respect, to be addressed as “your imperial highnesses.”

The result? More yelling, but beneath it, fatherly bewilderment.

We played Romanovs in school, people laughed, pointed. We held onto power with a fervency we’d never imagined, heads high, smiles conveying victory.

Two by E. Martin Pederson

E. Martin Pedersen, originally from San Francisco, has lived in eastern Sicily for over 35 years. He teaches English at the local university. His poetry has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Muddy River Poetry Review, Oddville, Former People, Trop Magazine and others. Martin is an alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.


Nudists

I had to wait until my father died
and mother’s jigsaw puzzle pieces
to discuss what to do with the trailer
oh yeah, that old trailer
that they used to use summers
at some campground in Oregon
I’d never been or paid attention
then it came out that it’s a nudist camp
my parents have been visiting for 30 years
I never noticed or they never told me
or they told me indirectly but I didn’t hear

oh, to imagine
my parents, male and female
volleyball and ping pong.


Nausea of Numbers

Go to a baseball game
or watch people at an airport
a county fair
the mall on Saturday
Lots of beauties, huh?
prettier than the actors we crave
Some look like friends who are dead
Some like lovers lost but not forgotten
like people in a mosque
You’ll never see them again
They gorge your visual memory
then pass on forever gone
Leaving the nausea of numbers.

September 2, 2005 by Emily Stephan

Emily Stephan is a freelance writer and educator who reads too many books and watches too many movies. Her fiction and poetry have been published by Z Publishing House, Cheap Pop, and the Manchac Review. She is also a regular contributor to the Ultimate Action Movie Club website.


September 2, 2005

I remember trees, glass, streetlights littering the roads,
the grass turned to mud, “looters will be shot” cardboard signs
tacked to the front of Mr. Palmer’s house, the roof caved in,
an evergreen prostrate across the upstairs bedroom

I remember the queasy silence in the car,
the unbearable stretch from Baton Rouge to back home,
mama fiddling with her rosary, daddy’s knuckles white on the wheel,
the awful question hanging in the air, left unspoken

I remember us screeching to a halt in front of the house—
our great pine tree toppled across the lawn,
just skimming the siding, crushing the azalea beds,
a few brown shingles scattered atop the monstrous foliage

I remember the first time I ever saw mama cry, hands hiding her face,
and daddy bowing his head, relieved exhalation deflating his body,
myself shocked at the spectacle of their catharsis,
the final confirmation that grown-ups could be afraid

Ogre by Suzanne Verrall

Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Monkeybicycle, Archer Magazine, Lip Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Australian Poetry Journal, and others.      www.suzanneverrall.com


Ogre

The ogre lived in the dense damp core of the forest. His treasures – the sheep with their self-spinning fleeces, the unsnuffling pigs – were born and grew and died as they had for all memory. Only the ogre had no beginning or end.

A silver-skinned princess stumbled into the forest. She wore a look of terror as if having woken to find herself blind.

The ogre smelt her. He lumbered through the forest, crushing wildflowers in his haste to glimpse her amongst the green-black shadows.

Day and night he watched her scavenging for berries, sipping dew from bladed grass. He fell in love. She became more beautiful and his love grew until it reached the last unvisited corner of his mighty ogre heart.

At which time he took the princess in his trunk-like arms and squeezed every last drop of life from her.

It was what was expected of him.

Empty Rebus by J H Martin

J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Website: acoatforamonkey.wordpress.com
Instagram: @acoatforamonkey


Empty Rebus

I need to get my self
Back in line
Before it all gets out of hand

The reminiscing – the highs
The whatever – the when

These two flows
From one source
Which I am too foolish
To even recognise

This fire escape door
Which I can keep on pulling
But I am too blind to push

Tangled up
By convoluted nuance
And constricted by
This recurring imagery
I always
Overcomplicate the meaning
Only then to simplify

Just as front follows back
And short measures long
I am nothing more
Than this dull mid-June day
And this battered notebook

Of course – just by saying that
Makes these dumb words
Turn back in on themselves
To May and then April and then on
Back to the point

Come on fool – shut up
I am sick of the drifting
From that point to this and then back to there
All I want is to stop
All these dreams of yesterday’s world

So come on fool – shut up
Sit down and be still
Just let it all
Solve its own undisturbed mystery

The High Moral Tone by R. J. Keeler

R. J. Keeler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lived in jungles of Colombia, S.A., up to age twelve. BS Mathematics NCSU, MS Computer Science UNC, MBA UCLA, Certificate in Poetry UW. Honorman, U.S. Naval Submarine School. “SS” (Submarine Service) qualified. Vietnam Service Medal. Honorable Discharge. Whiting Foundation Experimental Grant. P&W’s Directory of Poets and Writers. Member IEEE, AAAS, AAP. The Boeing Company. His collection “Detonation” will be published in December.


The high moral tone that he used in the bequest speech was judged to be insincere and moreover was received by all the audience consisting of family and attorneys and friends as borderline insubordination but regardless of the tone we all had to agree with each other that it was delivered the language not the tone with exquisite precision and correctness in addition the grammar was absolutely flawless to the point where during the speech there were at least three phrases that stopped my attention cold and for them I had to focus and quickly in the moment form a mental image of the sentence in question and ask is that correct wow I must have been using that word incorrectly all these years furthermore the content to my ears and listening mind sounded expertly well-crafted and even a bit rhetorical one got the sense that the speaker had labored over the speech well into the night before he gave it and had gone over it in the privacy of his study again and again asking himself what do I want the audience to conclude from this speech and how therefore do I guide them invisibly to that desired conclusion at the end of this bequest speech or maybe an hour afterwards after the show of hands and the signing of documents I began to realize that the whole affair was so very well-scripted and designed as to be underhanded and to manipulate us all into innocent little lambs acceding to the agendas of the speaker but by then it was too late.

Diogenes, the Artist’s Friend by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is author the of new hybrid works, The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci and Handlebody. His poetry has been accepted and appeared in many various literary journals and anthologies, including North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, Strata Magazine, and The Sandy River Review. He is an algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.


Diogenes, the Artist’s Friend

Pay good money to be in Diogenes’ bed
where hundreds of drawings and paintings
are exhibited and auctioned by Sotheby’s;
pay good money to be in a barrel on a rubbish tip,
where a room for one of the hundreds of homeless families,
is cut out from a hard cardboard left behind;
the door is not ajar, or a window does it just lurks,
from the first rainfall you have flown about the cover
like bats in a belfry, their colours are convictions.
Now here is the light of fresh evidence to improve you
in no doubtful submissions when every numberplate
I wear for a face for a post office road is signed,
something is overshadowed above us like a cloud.
Time is not enough to come to anything.
Somebody must look for what sustains.
I have found him sitting down near me,
whispering to himself, an imaginary part,
I am trying to welcome myself back
among the commons with a nightcap,
I am ragged. I am listening to all with his attention.

Absolution in Her Red Eyes by Nicole Efford

Nicole Efford is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.

Absolution in Her Red Eyes

Mara helps her mother out of the pew, hoping nobody will notice them slipping out before the end of service. She’d realized her mom was high when she came back from the bathroom, ten minutes into service, with eyes red and half-closed.

“Hope, hi. How are you?” Todd Baker whispers, blocking the door. His hair is pomaded high on his head—reaching for Jesus, Mara thinks.

She smiles innocently and says, “My mom’s not feeling too well right now. I should be getting her home.”

Todd’s eyes linger on Hope’s arm, and then meet her eyes. She stares back at him, unblinking, then drawls, “You are a sinner.”

He chuckles and shakes his head, “Well, we all are. But Jesus absolved us, Hope, you know that.”

“Mom, c’mon.” Mara says as she tugs on her mother’s arm.

“That’s probably a good idea, Mara. Do you need any help getting her to the car?”

Hope watches the man grow a red tail, then jabs her finger into Todd’s face and shouts, “Get away from my daughter!”

“Mom, stop!” Mara grabs Hope’s hand and pushes past the exit. “She’s really not feeling herself!” she calls over her shoulder, rushing toward the parking lot.

Mara gets in their car but Hope does not.

There is a demon in her car—Hope knows it. God has visited her and He has given her the power to detect evil. Hope stares as the demon in the driver’s seat grows two red horns. It is talking to her but she cannot understand; she has too much Heaven within her to speak to children of Hell. She shakes her head at the demon, “I will not go with you.”

Mara stares at her mother in disbelief. “You need to come with me. How else are you going to get home?” She lowers her voice so nobody around the church will hear, “You can’t go walking the streets doped up, mom. Get in the car.”

Mara’s words get through to her mother, and Hope recognizes that the demon in her car is her daughter. The demon pleads again, “Please, mom, let me just take you home and get you to bed.”

“You are not my child anymore,” Hope spits. She gets on her knees and pulls the cross up from around her neck to ward away the demon. “You, child of the Devil—with the power of God the Almighty, I banish you back to Hell!”

Mara glares at her mother, and then notices the silence surrounding them. She looks in the rearview mirror: Service has ended and people from church are staring. “I’m sorry, mom,” Mara says. She backs out of the spot, slowly, so that she doesn’t hit her. She puts the car in drive, and leaves her mother in the parking lot.

Hope gets off her knees and tucks her necklace back under her cardigan. The Devil has gone. She has saved her church. She smiles, sits back on the parking lot ground, and smiles up at the sky.