a poisonous
breath howls

wind and sand
across lips

longing to fall
onto something

warm and porous
moisture spits

shore shaped
waiting,

baring hope
the earth cannot die.

Laura Vitcova was born in Northern California and writes from her home near San Francisco. She is a multidisciplinary artist – poet, musician, photographer – with a passion for language. For her poetry combines words, music and images in ways that create powerful emotional experiences. In her spare time, she attends workshops, hikes with Eli the shaggy dog or is found looking through the lens of a camera. Twitter: @lauravitcova IG: @starlinglaura

I cough out
Earthworms as I
Claw my way
Up to you
Son. I hear
You stomp, pack
Down the dirt
Up there as
Hard as you
Can as if
Jigging on my
Grave.

Alexander Perez (he/him/his), a self-identified gay poet, lives in Albany, New York. There, he works at the University at Albany, where he obtained a master’s degree in philosophy. Alexander has poetry published in Trolley, journal of the New York State Writers Institute. He is a member of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. Mr. Perez can be contacted at perezpoet.press or @perezpoet on Instagram. Alexander dedicates his life, love, poetry to James Adriance.

1.
Awake at 3:00 AM ruminating
Dried tears scrape my skin as
I brush them from my lashes.
I want to understand the language that wakened me.
I want to understand the poem I am living.
I could write.
Instead, I turn to Ross Gay
contemplate his grandfather’s hands,
his grandfather watering his own grave.
2.
Neuropathy is what they call
the nerve damage caused by chemotherapy.
Neuropathy tingles between my bones
and the pen, numbs my writing.
You could compare it to lightening
though it lacks self-importance.
It seems determined but
disinterested in language
disinterested in tears.
An alarm I cannot silence
it does not speak
but rants its screech
in the hands of its only listener.

3.
This poem I am living has no meaning.
This poem I am living did not arrive bound
in a book, words scattered on pages.
This poem that I am living might better
have been left unstated.
This is the poem I am saying:

     There was a little girl
     with summer burnished skin
     who fell to the ground
     from the ancient apple tree
     lost her breath,
     then got it back
     and is breathing yet today.

4.
One cannot revise a lived poem.

Elizabeth Hykes lives and writes in a small town in Southern Missouri. Previous publication credits are few and local.

God bless the undertow
and the cold slap
of waders on the Sound.
Above are the black echoed waves
of nervous fiber,
a Jesus bug tension
that fills and lifts the fly line.
And between current and surface
is just a heaven
that touches here and back there and back then.

Pray with false cast after false cast—
the line like a lifting shawl unfurls and licks the sky—
breach the caul of the water with a tongue,
a dialect, and call the god of it all
with mumbling and tasting.
Hook the sea
and set its course
to amniotic waters.

Daragh Hoey is an Irish emigrant who has lived on all three American coasts and earned his degrees in computer science and law from Dublin City University and the University of Houston, respectively. Now settled in Seattle with his wife, son, and cat, he is a new writer, learning, and happy for it.

Black and white photos fill the wall –
a platinum blond in a bikini
holding her baby in a pool,
three gangly kids in skis,
a curly haired teen in a football uniform,
three senior photos of women with
glowing skin and feather bangs.

Around the corner a bookshelf
piled with photo albums –
kids pausing to smile for the camera.
Behind the camera,
mom and dad sip rum and coke,
gin and tonic, beer, wine,
smoke virginia slims and camels –
documenting evidence life happened
because most mornings they’ve
forgotten.

April Best is the writer and photographer behind stillsmallmomentsblog.com. Her pursuit of living wisely is a hopeful one, filled with dog-eared pages of books, and attempts to start and end each day in kindness. April studied English and French at York University in Toronto and has her Master’s Degree in English Literature.

Along the pier into the blackly swelling sea
We amble in the queue, and cold

While nearing the last planks

Some stop the waves
And some fall

Sara O’Rourke is a teacher and mother of two from Derby, UK who likes to write about all the messy bits of being human while drinking too much tea.

It’s said you say that one who knows
does not speak, while the chatter
of thoughtless souls
never ends.
I think perhaps, dearest
master Lao-Tzu,
you might consider
that the thinker has no choice
but speech, yet can only speak
in the unheard, unaccustomed
voice of thought, captive
of the strange inflection
of unfamiliar word-strings,
sounds that sound suspiciously
like silence.

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.

Every year I leave my work and my family and all the many distractions of my everyday
life behind and go on a five-day retreat in a remote monastery in the country to clear my mind by
doing and thinking of nothing. I take long walks in the mornings and in the afternoons sit quietly
reflecting on the essential meaning of life. The purpose of this, what I would in my everyday life
call being idle, is to rejoin the world renewed, refreshed, rejuvenated, restored.

But I can’t help noticing that the monks spend those same five days not in the idleness in
which I am engaged, the idleness I have been led to believe is essential to renewal, rejuvenation,
and restoration, at all. Not at all. No. They spend those same five days cooking, cleaning,
weeding the garden, harvesting the vegetables, and bottling the honey they sell by way of a lively
mail-order business. They spend their quiet moments not sitting in meditation, but mending their
own worn-out and wretched habits.

Sue Allison was a reporter for Life Magazine; her writing has also been published or is forthcoming in Best American Essays, Antioch Review, Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, DASH, El Portal, Harvard Review, (mac)ro(mic), New South, Streetlight Magazine, Threepenny Review, Flights, Fourth Genre, The Diagram, Isacoustic, Potato Soup Journal, Puerto del Sol, River Teeth, and a Pushcart Prize collection. She holds a BA in English from McGill University and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

I watch you order your food
Your head slightly bent, expectant
Your soft black hair falling out from behind your ear
Your eyes focused on the awaited sustenance
I have never loved you so much in all my life
It hurts like hell
It settles in my neck like cold porridge
And scratches my eyes with salt
I love you so much that I wonder
If the God that you pray to could understand
What it is to have a love so hard and imperfect
So mixed with hate and hope
That it makes me want to drop to my knees in the food court
And sob it into something
You could touch

Gwyn Gorski is an amateur poet, inspired to write by the people and the salty, verdant scenery of her home on the North East Coast.

-Drench-

Rainy day
Sketch

The dogs
Are so unhappy

They look human.

-Sermon-

The rain
Now falling harder,

At the mention of God.

-Thief-

Where’d the moon go
She said
And slipped her hand,

Into a coat pocket.

Carson Pierpont is a writer living in New York City who enjoys strolling Washington Square with the ghost of Mark Twain.