Joan McNerney’s poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze, Blueline, and Halcyon Days. Four Bright Hills Press Anthologies, several Poppy Road Review Journals, and numerous Kind of A Hurricane Press Publications have accepted her work. Her latest title is Having Lunch with the Sky and she has four Best of the Net nominations.

It’s Sunday

Your laughter
comes in cascades when
I toss your curly hair
tickling those big ears
with long blades of grass.

We stop at the lake startling
frogs just before they leap
away. Listen to squirrels brush
over carpets of crunchy leaves.

You turn to hold me, hold me
hurry it’s late. Pink clouds ribbon
heaven and I want your arms
around me forever.

Green Rain

I woke up
looked out
my window
and saw green
pouring down.

Trees cascading
over emerald grass.
This noon
swollen wet
bursting water.

Now even heaven
is tinted jade
as birds linger
under branches
listening.

This Evening

Becomes starry sapphire
as chimes tap against
our windowpane.

Sea gulls rise in
flight over rooftops.
Winds wrapping around
trees tossing leaves.

The court yard is full of
aromas from dinnertime.
Shadows growing longer
each minute. Lights go
on and I wait for you.

Lindsay Costello is a poet and art writer living in Portland, OR. Her chapbook So What if I’m Unfolding? was published in 2017, followed by Bloomswelling in 2018. Also in 2018, her digital poetry project Poetics of Space Angel was featured in the online exhibition estranged.love. Her work has appeared in Meadow’s Summer Field Guide, Pallas Magazine and SUSAN / THE JOURNAL. She studied textiles at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, where her thesis project analyzed the conceptual intersections between poetry and weaving.

Peaches

Between them a type of drowning.
A distance measured in carpeting
Or
The furry halo around a peach, or
That grey film of moving, seeing from a light place
To a dark place. Squinting.
That distance.

I waited in the ash-glow staring
At a lizard chasing itself, or nothing,
As screams rattled the windows.

My father once convinced me that
Money lived in the ceiling.
Quarters mostly, nested in plaster,
Warm children.
I stood on a chair and reached for them.

Dripping

I already wonder about summer
And its beasts in bloom
All becoming bats
Hanging sweat and limb
Chewing lettuce or watermelon

I wonder about it
When one day an interruptive stillness
And a river somewhere halts
And limbs go bare and dry out
Like apricot leather

Rich H. Kenney, Jr. is an associate professor of social work at Chadron State College in Chadron, NE. His essays and poetry have been published in Streetlight Magazine, Social Work Today, and Cloudbank.

Ice Fishing in Room 103

It’s the flag
that springs up
when learning strikes
that makes me
want to teach
or, at least, salute.

Far-sighted lesson plans
anchor attention,
beg perspective,
inspire
see-in-the-dark
sense and inquiry.

Yet, sometimes,
the flag doesn’t trip-
the lecture drifts
or the exercise
drowns
in deep-water paradigm.

That’s when I reach
for the tackle box,
the go-to
sweet-and-sour lure,
the one scratched
in reality bites.

You can make cases
for tables and tenets
and textbook theories
but, occasionally,
it’s the hook of practicality
that keeps me from saying

you should have seen
the one
that got away.

Of Ponds and Pedagogy

Onto lily pads
Teaching lands ideas

Ones with legs
Light enough
To cross the water’s
Thumbtacked rafts of green,
Wending ways
To purpose

Ones with teeth
Sharp enough
To cut through
Thick stands of cattails,
The patrolling reed towers
Of sameness

Ones with soul
Deep enough
To venerate
The silence of snails,
Musings of frogs,
The Tao of dragonflies

It’s in the approach,
The quiet arrival,
The delicacy
Of delivery

Here We Go Again

The next time you represent
the winning run at third
in a game racking up
extra innings,
ignore the voice within,
the one you know
as here we go again,
the one that likes
to reminisce with tales of fiasco-
like the time in grade school band
when you single-handedly
flubbed the grand finale
with a rowdy,
out-of-sync cymbal crash;
or the time in junior high
on Science Day
when you sparked
the sure-to-win experiment
into shocking plumes of smoke;
or the infamous senior class play
when you blurted out lines
from another show…

There’s chemistry in a message
once you find its rhythm,
once you feel its energy.
And for everything lost
in hasty crescendo,
there’s an understudy
waiting to be heard.
Next time,
listen closely
to its monologue
about here we go again
and the chance to get it right.

Take your lead
with an eye to the mound
because maybe you’ll break
with the pitch-
or maybe you have;
maybe you’re already home…

Vinnie Sarrocco is a poet and ne’er-do-well hailing from the American South. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Coffin Bell, SPREAD, Beholder Magazine, & others. He is the author of the chapbook “Under the Oak Tree”, and his full-length collection is scheduled to be published with Chatwin Books in 2019.

Eulogy

He was a man
whose keys were
persistently slipping
off their metallic band;
a magnet for ghosts
that once belonged
to benign pranksters/
The kind of guy
who finds himself
in sentences
he’s yet to read
but will someday/
A man with too many
bones rattling around
beneath thin skin
clanking down hallways
audible only in the
sounds of humming fans
and ambient low whispers
of those with nothing
interesting to say
He was/
Mostly.

Raymond Byrnes lives in Virginia. His recent poems have appeared in Shot Glass Journal, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Panoply, Typishly, Better Than Starbucks, Eclectica, Sky Island Journal, and Split Rock Review.

Asters

Out front, soaking rains that fell last month
push out, through sun-scorched clumps,
scattered clouds of waving white anemones.

Out back, as red and yellow zinnias subside,
plain green aster shrubs, dressing for the last
dance, unbutton a thousand purple blossoms.

Vagrant monarchs, probing worker bees,
swallowtails, fritillaries, moths in moonlight
mine densely flowered mounds, mottled gold.

A week of rain leaves blue-chalk skies, starry
nights trailing frost at dawn, and abandoned
aster plants, heavily arrayed in soft brown buds.

Airborne

They say, for all the millions spent on micro-drone
development, plus testing them aloft in swarms,
nothing yet can match the aerobatics of a dragonfly.

Children know. They scream and run with covered
heads from the bug that comes to stitch their scalps.
Doesn’t matter if it never happens, because it might.

From perched to full speed in a blink; forward, back,
up, down; catching, eating flies on the wing; it flits
about, propelled on four thin strips like latticed glass.

Dragons fly in many forms: Darners, Skimmers,
Meadowhawks, Dashers, Snaketails, Boghaunters,
Spineylegs, Clubtails, Shadowdragons, Emeralds.

Engineered assemblies fly, but fuel cells get depleted.
Dark water nymphs climb stems to wait in sunlight for
humped-up creatures to burst their skin and open wings.

Krisan Murphy lives in North Carolina and writes about her childhood in Mississippi.

Prehistoric

ours is
the long dirt driveway
where the mississippi sun
beats sweat
out of my brothers and me

running, jumping, chasing
evaporates salty beads
sliding down our temples

we cool under
spreading branches
of an oak

a rusty trike, a dismantled buggy,
a red wagon
assembles into a spaceship

dreaming of the moon
I tug two astronauts
to the launch pad

red dirt
clings to our bare feet
as we work

cotton bale clouds
darken, cool, and warn us
but we three stand
in a sandy hole
waiting

lifting grimy hands
to catch the first
gift of heaven

a single drop
then
pelting, drenching, drowning rain
fills our pot with gold

hollering and dancing,
squishing mud with our toes

the storm ceases
and steam rises
from the parched earth
twigs and little hands
stir malleable clay
to form
creatures of our imagination

matted hair
dries
turns shorts orange
sitting in the puddle

at bedtime
scrubbed and fed
slipping between clean sheets
i dream
of tomorrow
when the screen door will slam
behind me
when i
go outside and play

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 and he has a collection due out from a small press in Berlin. 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.

Three Chords

My best night and saddest moment
in China was the night you wore
your sweater dress, the one with slits
and we went out to eat dishes such as
Da Pan Ji and Ughyur flatbreads

and yet when you came home with me
I had to send you away because you
are my student. You walked through
the black iron gates and for a few minutes
stood revolving in your light brown cashmere
coat, your almond face white in the moon

Henry He is age 28. Located in Los Angeles. His other interests include theatre, acting, and drawing. His favorite types of music include reggae, ska, classical, country and gospel.

I Walk on the Freeway

when it’s time to go
don’t make a big deal
just head out that door,
there’s a bucket of water
I left for you
don’t drink from it
even if you thirst
resist
your journey has yet to begin
and once you have crossed the roads
and passed the houses they built on the cliff
then you will know you are on your way
but until you see those houses on the cliff
and the sun shining upon them
you have not lived

red bird

if it takes longer than that to go but whether or not you go
then it can be seen like a bird flying into a forest
long ago.
“the bird is red” said the old
and red bird is good to see
it isn’t so, just that it isn’t good but the child’s angel is that red bird
you can’t deny such things.
father won’t you come to see the child
but he is in the forest hunting for the red bird.

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.

What Makes Me Happy

Their eyes stare back into my own,
Familiar features long I’ve known,
Just lately to appreciate
The life bestowed on them by fate
Plus circumstances mine alone.

Idyllic aspirations blown
With every disappointment–prone
To fall far short or much too late.
Their eyes stare back.

Looking back on how they’ve grown
Strong saplings from the seeds I’ve sown
As opportunities abate
I pray my love will resonate.
Most precious gifts I helped create–
Their eyes stare back.

Depression’s Lies

“Depression brings humility.”
Her glaring inability?
Constructively self-criticize.
For criticizing amplifies
The flaws that only she can see.

Suppressing sensitivity
To camouflage fragility,
She flirts with failure if she tries.
“Depression brings humility.”

Confronting fallibility,
Betrays innate servility,
If only she could realize
A way to stop believing lies;
Repeating in her mind, she cries:
“Depression brings humility.”

Ignorance in Love

We’re innocent–how one small gesture can
Define relationships and change life’s course.
We charge ahead, choose risk, and dare remorse
To end our romance right where it began.
Imagine circumvention as a plan:
Precluding fights and failures and divorce;
By ending bad engagements at the source,
We could improve the happiness of man!

But life is not all joys devoid of pain.
Who can predict each outcome of a kiss?
What moments cherished would be lost with this?
Contingencies are hard to ascertain
As are which moments we will reminisce.
Our ignorance in love is truly bliss.

Karlo Sevilla writes from Quezon City, Philippines and is the author of two poetry collections: “Metro Manila Mammal” (Soma Publishing, 2018) and “You” (Origami Poems Project, 2017). He was a runner-up in Submittable’s 2018 National Poetry Month poetry contest and one of his poems is nominated by Ariel Chart for the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology. His poems have appeared in Philippines Graphic, Eclectica, Milk + Beans, The Broken Cassette, Scarlet Leaf Review, and others. He currently studies for the Sertipika sa Panitikan at Malikhaing Pagsulat sa Filipino (Certificate in Literature and Creative Writing in Filipino) program of the Center for Creative Writing of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

creation story

before the beginning,
it was decided
that it would be
a chiaroscuro.

and it was pure
entertainment
ever since.

alone in a forest, midnight

you cup your hands around an ember, to sustain it
and hope it rises again into the bonfire it was moments ago.

a cloudless sky, and the stars are out in full force. yet,
their collective light is wanting; they are too far away.

always too far away.

forest clearing at dawn

a sunray
breaks and multiplies
through the branches

a fairy
pirouettes
on the nose
of a fawn

a nymph
seated on a stone
strums the breeze

a dew drop
on a leaf
trembles

drips