Raymond Byrnes managed communications for many years for the U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat satellite program. His recent poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Shot Glass Journal, Panoply, Typishly, Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia.

Locust

That locust on the hill
the one nearly wide
as tall, waves a thousand
moss-green feathers
each one a hundred leaves.

Every feather sways in rhythm
with the wind, but not like
frantic pom-poms shaken
at the game; more like how
Aretha’s boa shimmied
when she took her bows.

Eric Roller lives and works in Port Angeles, Washington. He enjoys teaching youth and wandering aimlessly on the Olympic Peninsula.

A Personal Memorandum of Misunderstanding

Today, a Wednesday,
I’m sitting in my office
with its rectangular window set
perpendicular to the world,
writing this poem of resignation
on company letterhead.
There have been other signs
of my surrender for weeks:
I forget to shave on Sunday nights;
I wear Hawaiian shirts on Mondays;
on Tuesdays, I sport hiking boots
with khakis, and
last Friday, a half-day, I wandered
off into the woods adjacent to work
and fed my lunch to the chipmunks.
This particular office job,
like the many in the past
I shouldn’t have accepted,
now tops my list of places
I look forward to leaving behind,
just nudging out that portable toilet
I once visited on a 110-degree day
in a solitary desert campground
in Southern Arizona.

It started off amiably enough
last February.
I admit, I was infatuated with the facilities,
especially the gym with the convenient
personal sanitation wipes—
and I was smitten by
the discussion of benefits,
the 10-personal days and matching
retirement plan.
And as I walked away from the interview,
knowing I had landed the job,
I secretly smiled with
the thought of possibly
making it 20 years
for the pension.

Today, though,
a Wednesday,
this job has worn
through the fabric of the months
to bare the bones of
my starved resolve.
This morning, a mouthpiece
called an emergency
meeting about mission statements
and guiding principles.
A memorandum of understanding
was laid gently on my office chair
like a leaf on a forest floor while
I was away from my desk, and
by mid-morning
there was a heated debate
on the post-traditional re-engagement
of our institutional engagement plan.
After lunch, a time I like
to spend fretting about the future,
I was asked by my boss with a serious face
to conduct a laser-like examination
of the overall
capacity of our tools.

I sit here in my office, now,
just before quitting time,
my door wide open while
I write these words
in jagged columns,
hoping to get caught
with my pen on paper
meant for official
business only.
My stomach and chest
are beginning to tighten
with the anticipation of what
I know I’m about to do:
Walk into my superior’s office,
the one in the corner with the view
and the family photos with frames that read
“Happiness” or “Fun Times,”
slowly remove my keys from
their lanyard, and then slide them
across the newly waxed conference table
and say, feigning sadness,
I am submitting this,
my personal memorandum
of misunderstanding.

April Sevilla likes photography equally as well as writing poems. She always carries a camera along with her pen and paper wherever she goes. Watching cats, clouds, rain, stars and newborns are what truly makes her happy.

Unprofitable Combinations

You, me, and the other
Are like dust, smoke, and water

…That pretty much sums it up

JBN self-identifies as a label-resistant American native of variegated hues. His children’s musical Chimes: A Christmas Vaudeville premiered in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Santa Claus in attendance, opening night. He is host/facilitator for the Hell’s Kitchen International Writers’ Roundtable, which meets twice monthly at Manhattan’s Columbus Library: walk-ins are welcome.

A Rap: To the Over-Eager

Perhaps you have to do
What you think you have to do.
Perhaps, however, you don’t really have to.
Perhaps it’s only what you think you want.
But take it from me, kid, consequences haunt
And ghosts do linger and cankers grow—
Don’t you think that I should know?
Oh I’m not saying don’t
But that perhaps it’s wise to stall.
It’s their funeral but it’s your Fall.

[A mother]

A mother
cannot be a poet.
There’s too much to do.

A mother cannot see the newborn as
    the hope of the future
    the glitter in the firmament
    the lifeblood con¬summation of all cause
and certainly not as
    the onset of intract¬able death.

A mother-poet like that must go mad.
And yet—

A mother cannot help
but be a poet

As she protects the progeny from
    non-existent dangers
    imagined threats—every bush at night a bear—
and acts as if she herself were
the young thing’s swaddling armor till
    a ripe age when the cloth is shred
    to rags, the metal rusts and clanks, while
    all that remains unsaid below the surface
lies still
    and cold as the ice in the ocean, while
    hot as all the lava that laces the hells of living earth.

And when the child folds into an adult—

A mother cannot possibly be a mother,
    which, in fact, she can only be,
and cannot help,
    but cannot help
but help.

I hope these sundry paradoxes
help you understand
your mother.

The Language of Encouragement

When the cat was new the claws and teeth
were trained before they’d become bayonets;
the leaps and junkets to exotic lands,
no reprimand from you but twee caresses
and glee in a soprano register
that passed for kitty talk. Destruction did
not mount to much, yet.
And when he grew
he walked all over every gut and scalp
the same as ledges, as if all were his,
leaving a wake of shattered cachepots’ shards
and desultory scratch marks. See how easy
and natural it is for him, now free
and fully formed, to join the terrorists.

Jessica Sommerfeldt recently completed her degree in history and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz. Her work has previously appeared in Chronogram Magazine and Stonesthrow Review.

Daylight

When daylight first seeps between
The faded white blinds
I rise like a sun
boundless in joy and energy and
for these few moments I revel in
this taste of invincibility
even while deep down I know
that by the time the clock strikes noon
I’ll have fallen back asleep

Reflections

Why must everything hurt,
I asked
She chuckled,
The world is nothing but pain, child
Only then did I realize
I was speaking to a mirror

Jo Longley is an alumna of Kingston University’s Creative Writing MFA Program and past Editor of ‘Ripple Magazine.’ Her poetry has been published by ‘Cattywampus,’ ‘Confingo,’ The Enemies Project, and ‘Anapest’ among others.

Narcissus Bulbs

My brain is a daffodil.
I like the crisp line of your trousers,
pressed divinely; an employable skill that is.
I’m scared most every day,

like all things that happen everyday—meh.
A sustained lightning flash of terror looks just like
a plain white wall. Who’d have known? Besides
the terrified and soldiering on. A daffodil? Yes.

I couldn’t begin to explain why, save the soles
of my feet ache, you seem suitable to employ,
and I press this upon you: for a while you
crave color—a splash, a dot—and

when that does not come,
you swear to every aphid that crawls over you:
some black would be suitable, actually, a wall of black
would really do.

Rose lives with her family in the Appalachian Mountains where she serves her community as a behavioral health professional. By night she enjoys reading, writing, and spoiling her cat.

Skin Memory

Uncanny how the skin remembers
At your mere suggestion it warms
And flits like summer water
How simple it is to
Open memory’s
Window and feel
The night air
Speak of
You

REID MITCHELL is a New Orleanian teaching in China. More specifically, he is a Scholar in Jiangsu Province’s 100 Foreign Talents Program, and a Professor of English at Yancheng Teachers University. He is also Consulting Editor of CHA: AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL. His poems have been published by CHA, ASIA LITERARY REVIEW, IN POSSE, and elsewhere. His first collection, SELL YOUR BONES, was published by Berlin’s PalmArtPress. Way back in the 20th century, he published the novel A MAN UNDER AUTHORITY. He also had a separate career as an historian of the American Civil War.

Hank Williams
And The Whipperwills
Whisper “Sweet Darlin’,
Go To Sleep,
Good Night”

I know those painted black steel
stairs you ascend, high heels
dangling in your weary hand

I have seen the noir seams
of your laddered stockings
gone crooked

the swelling of your calves
the tilt of your razor-edged skirt
the way your left hand lifts

your bob cut black hair
from where it kisses the nape
of your muscular, tango neck

the naked, screwed-in bulb
flickering yellow messages
into Morse Code for ghosts

trying to try not to give up, at least
not this particular whipperwill night
not with Hank Williams watching

from heaven

James Croal Jackson has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in MORIA, off the coast, and Oyster River Pages. He edits The Mantle. Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. jimjakk.com

Red Bricks, Gray Sky

I wear
another hungry
headache from
waking

drool dribbling out
into blue pool
on pillow
having shaken

off another night
of tigers’ teeth
and bent bones
grateful at least

inside a home
to pour
yesterday’s coffee
drank black then

to the bridge
to watch
yachts fade
into mist

oh how the rich
don’t know
what they’re missing

The Last Beer

Made all the better

because it’s the last one,
like the last sweet kiss that
sends a soldier to war.

When gone,
the house will be empty,
the spirits departed.