Destine Carrington is a queer, black woman living in North Carolina because she enjoys challenges. Other things she enjoys include but are not limited to: burgers, brownies, and Batman. Her work has also appeared in Serendipity Literary Magazine, Jokes Review, Drunk Monkeys Literary Magazine, and Five2One Literary Magazine’s thesideshow.

After Jack

With his bound head, Jack went to bed
but Jill lay by the hill.
They found her that morn
her skin adorned
with frost so cold and clean.
They say by the well
there still lays the pail
that held her wails
and screams.

Bumblebee

Pain.
A liquid pain filled her chest, and as it buzzed up her throat, it brought along a burning sensation that coated her entire mouth like molasses.
There was a weight at the center of her stomach—it fluttered, tumbled
flight of the bumblebee, all around.
The weight gripping the base of her spine
The bumblebee’s flight picks up tempo
She falls to her knees
Was she even standing?
She fell
and fell
and fell
Outside. Alone.

swamp thing

I’ve done not all good things.
I’ve said not all good things.
I’ve been not all good – things
have made; things haven’t made see-saw.
Things have made more like an hourglass; not in
grains. Things have made more like a figure – the one we never seem to get, ourselves, quite right at the
hip.
Pull. Dip.
Sway.

Please don’t lock me away.
Please don’t lock me under eye and board.
Please don’t lock me away. Please stay.
Stay.
            Away.

Aura Martin is currently a senior creative writing (B.F.A.) student at Truman State University. She serves as staff writer for The Index–Truman State University’s student-led newspaper–intern at Golden Antelope Press, and assistant nonfiction editor at WORDPEACE. In Aura’s free time, she likes to run and take road trips.

There is No Space for Anything (But Dreaming)

            Last time I drove to a reading I brought a boy who wasn’t my boy but a boy from class. He stretched bungee sentences and overloaded hot cocoa with spices. He just didn’t know when to shut up, but talking wasn’t what I had in mind when I asked him out. He is that boy with the crooked smile and thumbprint lizards on his notebook. I never learned how to draw flames properly.
            The second time I went to a reading, I asked a girl who was a girlfriend who I thought was alone but that girl now too has someone. She is the hot apple cider I needed in my life, and on the drive, she insisted I wear her mustard gloves. She read me her poetry, unknitting words from her tapestries.
            When was the last time you kissed someone?
            Read me something else. My eyes facing away from the red band on the horizon.
            Didn’t you have your heart broken, from that boy at Blue Shed?
            Yes, but even if that woman wasn’t in the way, he still would’ve said no.
            To find love, the trick is to leave the door open, and then somebody will come along and stand there smiling and ask if you would like some company. I left that door open for two years, in sunshine and snow showers. The only ones who stopped by were peeping Toms and boys with dead daisies.
            You’ve got to be desperate to approach the awkward tomboy who always says the wrong thing.
            Several glasses of wine later, I realize that I am the person you feel sorry for. I throw away the heart locket and punch every light bulb till there is only darkness and bleeding hands.

Terry Has been painting for over forty five years. He just started creating Poems, he has had five poems in the Salt Lake City Weekly paper. Four Kindle E- Books. Variant and Tide S.L.C.C. Anthologies. A Sonnet in Rue Scribe.

Sleepy Whale 253

Agency of fire
Polyhedral masses of bituminous coal
Foliated fossilized decides
Omnipresent primeval forest
Aluminiferous vegetative existence
The sun uneven calorifloation
Unpolished dark surface of the moon
Double filiform rise in temperature
Simultaneously both sides want to boil
Double
Kettle lid ejection

“The world’s resource of choices are being depleted. For myself as a young adult, the spectrum of choice is a narrow one. Career paths are limited and stunted; movement and experiences have been similarly constricted by accessible time, money, and energy. In poetry, however, I have found a space of unlimited autonomous choice. My words can be placed and spread to communicate the deepest wells of myself or jumbled to the point of complete incomprehensibility. And so, I am an artist in the Hudson Valley, New York with work published in Penultimate Peanut Magazine and Genre: Urban Arts Journal.” Twitter: @workmarytr, Email: 217workmartyr@gmail.com

Omens

Sometimes I leave the door open
For a chance of a breeze
You might take it for an omen
But none in my home leave

Vern Fein is a retired special ed teacher who started writing poetry three years ago and, with help from poetry groups and friends, has had some success publishing, but really just loves the experience and learning in his golden years.

Leave-Taking

Does the mother bird rue
when her fledgling leaves the nest,
drop the worm while the
father squawks and squawks,
soothes her ruffled feathers?

We humans though scratch and claw
when one of ours moves far away
sad over
the very reason
we raised them.

“But I am not a bird,”
my wife cries,
as she nests in my arms.

Rising

Early in the morning
your mind a carousel
riding thoughts, memories
up, down,
round and round
on, off,
giraffes, unicorns, lambs
or
gargoyles, serpents, dragons
you must choose
hang on tight
face the day.

Exhilaration

That summer, a newly licensed teen
eager to drive anytime,
my Step-Mother remembered
what she forgot at the store,
a green pepper, sour cream.

Sometimes, on purpose,
I forgot some of her items,
anxious to drive back
when she beckoned,
handed over the shiny keys.

Years later, my wife and I retired,
after we drive together
on our little shopping trips,
she forgets more and more,
sends me back,
a green pepper, sour cream.
I am delighted to drive.

Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.

Just Another Long Goodbye
(Raymond Chandler)

There’s no easy out for discontent
at the office. Nothing helps,
not a bottle stashed in your desk,
not even girls from the typing pool
willing to help you slip out of your skin
for an hour in the afternoon.

Solitary drives up the coast and back down
only leave you where you began.
A dead end.

And writing? No help either
because the noir’s inside you,
not in LA,
and all the wisecracks, the cynical asides
never amused the demons that much.

Hollywood’s just another oil company:
nothing to choose between an intractable plot
and a ledger that refuses to balance
when it’s always you
failing to make them come out right.

Studio execs keep the hooch on hand
(an unwritten codicil)
as you scribble in your closet.
And Marlowe’s there in a dark corner
sneering at you.

So you’d better go home to La Jolla, Ray,
and lay your throbbing head once more
on Cissy’s lap,
calm at last—a weaned child,
except for the whiskey at bedtime.

Shopping at Guarantee Shoe Center
(Seamus Heaney)

Brando in sandals and then scuffed boots
as an introspective Zapata,
who went barefoot most of his life;
Fred Astaire’s scuffed brogues
with metal taps, dinged and nicked
like worn out Kantian philosophers;
crepe-soled brothel creepers,
geriatric Birkenstocks
and the has-been rocker’s brogans;
those bankrupt penny loafers
in the dust of my closet,
crouched in despair, abandoned
for Spanish leather driving moccasins:
Shoes of all kinds, but none
compare with the hand-stitched high-tops
Seamus Heaney wore
at that post-reading grad student party in ’72:
Shamrock green with yellow scroll work,
glistening leprechaun footgear
that no one mentioned—
those timid poets
blathering loud nonsense over their beer mugs
as if they were outré.
And no one got close enough to Heaney
to risk stepping on his toes.

Carolyn Asnien has worked as a welfare caseworker, teacher on the Navajo Reservation, probation officer, astrologer, substance abuse counselor and hypnotherapist. But she has always been a poet.

In Russia

(Therapy Session)
“In Russia…” he said of his nighttime dream
as his head tilts into a perfect Modigliani oval
“In Russia…”

My own dream last night was of a lover leaving
my heart sinking.
So now my dream looks at his dream
our night images walking back and forth between us

This frigid morning he comes to his appointment
bringing me black sugared coffee
and says he had a bad week
drinking
starting fights
watching porn
because his father died a year ago this January
in Russia
and he needs to let him go

How cold it must have been when his father died
And never before have I thought to picture my own father
as a boy
in Russia
the snow falling…

Randal A. Burd, Jr. is an educator, freelance editor, writer, and poet. His freelance writing includes assignments on the paid writing team for Ancestry.com and multiple online blogs, newsletters, and publications.

Randal received his Master’s Degree in English Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Missouri. He currently works on the site of a residential treatment facility for juveniles in rural Missouri. He lives in southeast Missouri with his wife and two children.

Humblest Apologies

Too personal a thought to be laid bare,
A naked truth now shrouded in cheap rhyme.
No less profound to stand the test of time
Than those the masters once saw fit to share.
Why should a random stranger deem to care?
Expression via sonnet is a crime–
To use such an archaic paradigm
And then expect one’s talent to compare.

Consider, then, emotions found within
And surely found throughout humanity
Have meant enough to someone such as me
To risk unwanted feelings of chagrin.
And thus, with ample warning, pray begin
To reassess conventionality.

Prematurely Blessed

I watched her come too fast into this world.
I heard those faint unhealthy infant cries.
And as they checked her length and weight and size,
Her little fingers ’round my finger curled.
Untimely from her mother’s womb was hurled
Our premature and sickly sacred prize
Who, we would later come to realize,
Became the star ’round which our planet whirled.

Her sickliness received intensive care;
Pneumonia left her lungs and let her thrive–
So lucky and so blessed to be alive!
Our lives were changed forever then and there.
And ever since our daughter did arrive,
There’s never been a day that could compare.

While Waiting

While waiting for the Greyhound bus,
my dad and I, the two of us,
recounted pleasant moments passed:
the memories we had amassed,
experienced, and oft discussed.

Our dialog continued thus—
light-hearted and extraneous—
until we saw the bus at last
while waiting.

We said goodbye without much fuss;
I stepped into the ominous,
uncharted future from the past
not knowing how my die was cast
and feeling I grew up too fast
while waiting.

Kevin Wayne Zerbe is a writer, photographer, and ecologist. His work is the welcomed burden of flowing water, cold hands, conservator of natal streams. His dedication to the conservation of natural resources informs all he does. The bodies of he and his wife are lost now in a megalopolis, but their souls roam the hidden valleys of the Northern Rockies.

OXBLOOD

Ox’s blood on my boots is stainin em.
Hair on the ground just
thin strands,
like straw.
Steel wire.

That dog’s barkin agin.
Lost in them hills.
White dog,
can’t find hisself in white snow.

His nose don’t work.
Snow been maskin my scent.
Wind been mufflin my whistlin.

He’ll catch the smell of meat,
that I’m sure of.
I’ll cook,
and he’ll come on home.