This started out as a novel,
a major work of fiction.
Nothing less than 100,000 words would do.

Not even close.

Bother.

Bruce Greenhalgh lives in Adelaide, South Australia where, amongst other things, he reads, writes and recites poetry. His work has appeared in anthologies, journals and online… He is yet to master being ‘fashionably late’ or being ‘the life of the party’. Some things are just beyond him.

i’ve never understood the people who
gently toast their marshmallows to golden
perfection. but sometimes i envy them –
going ever-so-slowly, patiently waiting.

i’m always rushing right into the fire,
welcoming the heat, mesmerized
by dark edges, with no regard for the
scorched and sticky consequences…
hoping to make something delicious from
burnt sugar and smoldering remains.

Julie Clark is an attorney and mixed media artist who is currently pursuing her MFA at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Asheville, North Carolina. (She’s still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up but, in the meantime, writing poetry makes her very happy.)

I’m a bucket-traveler,
a bread-on-bread mate,
like a hobo
with breath-crushing-gypsy-gas,
a yeasty timberland (just look around),
a flinty nugget and hardworking-slouch,
a knitted skeleton,
a cord-clotting emergency.

Later I’ll be blood fodder for bugs and webs.
O, the places I have traveled!
And God wrote on the bread wrapper:
“Tell me your story.”
And thus, always an obedient root,
I have.

Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Brushfire, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Flights, Midwest Quarterly, The Opiate, Pine Hills Review, Tulsa Review, Visitant Lit, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer For Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.

You, a tree, in me,
over time.
If it dread, if it darken, if fall
to ruin, you will do, this too,
the next thing…over time.
Now one foot now the other. Now
late, even. I am keeper of undermined,
you are patient.
All of us, any of us, you said, I wasn’t born
this way.
I, unbuilt.
See how the thickening clouds yield light snow.
Why am I unseasonably cool?
Friend of my mind:
We restore ancient things, sweet, salt, &
bitter. We bring things back and back.
The dark is big.
I met you in the district of rain, the tears
of things. Later than we might have known,
but both still vivid.
I am in the habit of you, and sometimes
able to, my soft parts, tenderly.
Things that have to do with enlargement.
What had been required of you.
If I had not submitted, nowhere.
Also, what you yourself went through affects
interpenetration:
We investigate each other’s bearings.
Things come up between us, wide.
I am glad this journey with you, you said.
Sometimes, with you, I luminate.
Abiding.

Sarah Stemp is a poet and psychologist/psychoanalyst in New York City. She has published poetry on various topics related to the role of grief and mourning in the creation of something new.

a stone come to rest
fashioned with loving hands
It is a harmony of sea and wind
In a woman’s shape

It’s as if the artist knew the woman without touching her
without seeing her naked
just imagining

Dorothy Johnson-Laird is a poet, social worker, and activist who lives in New York City. She received an M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dorothy also has a passion for African music and has published music journalism with www.afropop.org and www.worldmusiccentral.org. Of late, she has been intrigued by the small in writing, making a powerful statement in just a few lines.

Structure chisels
piety from chaos
sacred from clay.

Children so alive corrected
for uniform educated
knee-bending.

Fve-year-olds fidget
bodies cry out for sanctuary
on the other side of the door.

I should pull them out
and put them in trees
to sleep the afternoon with cardinals

and dreams of carnivals, screeching or silent as the sky determines.

I have not obstructed water when it should run.
I have not extinguished a flame when it ought to burn.

But I leave them there
for fear of what this world does
to children who live in trees.

Jessica Tilley Hodgman is a writer and historian living near where she was born in Roswell, Georgia. She studied history and world religions to consider the various myths we create so we can look at our pasts, make some sense of our present, and not be so afraid of the future.
Her essays, short stories, and poetry draw on childhood experiences in the rural South and adult experiences in the urban South.
She is currently collaborating on a collection of essays on the long-term immigrant experienced in metro Atlanta. Also—a short story about a lovable septuagenarian murderer.

Despite intimidation it has its way.
Still, from a closet with a one-way
window, you scrutinize that self—
helpless, though reluctant to crack
the door, peel off into that space,
fisticuff that thief into submission,
some admission, since if you did,
there’d always be a next you, back
in the dark, seizing the emptied seat
opposing the pane of introspection.

D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. Recently retired from college teaching, James lives with his wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

I’m the Bride of Frankenstein’s mechanic.
She drives a Toyota Echo.
It’s been a good little car.
I can’t recall doing any major repairs to it.
I asked her how it was for room,
What with her husband, the monster, being a big guy.
She said it was fine, no worries,
But then added, with a sparkle in her eye,
That it might be different when there’s a little Frankie.
I asked her about the gearbox.
She said it was hard finding reverse sometimes.
‘It’s a fault with that model’, I replied.

We could talk about a lot of things:
Life, death, marriage, body parts…
But I stick to cars.
It’s what I know best.
She’s been talking about getting an electric car.
Says it’s the way to go –
Electricity.
I guess it’s what she knows best.

Bruce Greenhalgh lives in Adelaide, South Australia where, amongst other things, he reads, writes and recites poetry. His work has appeared in anthologies, journals and online… He is yet to master being ‘fashionably late’ or being ‘the life of the party’. Some things are just beyond him.

The hillsides hang, coral-stained,
their heavy drapery this simple
space enfolds, inverts the coppery
moonrise skies and softly gathers dust.

Quietly, the ragged ridge advances
on my clamorous quiet, invests this
place, encroaches on each instant’s
insubstantial, its inviolate defenses.

We are made earth, made stone,
made skin in this approximation:
made self, made place by the outside-
in that each inviolable self unselves.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, raised in Japan and Mexico, he has returned to poems after a long hiatus in business and the sciences. His work has appeared in numerous journals.

As a child,
night surrounded everything outside;
even the daytime woods were wild,
no places I could hide.

Now, clumsy collisions in the dark
are mainly what I have to dread—
to stub a toe or bark
a battered shin. The dead

are closer to me now. Woodland trails,
once gained, are in the past, the roots, the rocks.
All matter threatens me travails—
a trundle down the hall in no-slip socks,

a drip and trolley at my side,
a chair, a bed the goals of day and night.
It is the errant step I must avoid.
It’s not a welcome sight.

Although a poet since his 30s, Wheelock’s intense immersion in the writing of poetry is relatively recent; his lifelong career has been in music, as a composer of chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at Smith College. He lives with his wife Anne in an old house at the edge of a hayfield in Whately, Massachusetts.