I sit all alone in this faculty lounge and consider how
my life’s been spent till now and question where
I went awry and ponder darkly just what
I’ve become implies and wonder if I’m not whom (or who?)
I could or should have been, too, and I forget why
I even try to do this job, and rue which
roads not taken, etc., etc., when
the bell tolls for me and I must slog away to Period 3, where
I will gamely face my class, who (or whom?)
I’m paid to teach (and dearly love, I do) but whose
faces often only bear a bland or bored “Whatever.”
But then there are times when we connect, when
epiphanies spark in our eyes, and when
that lightning strikes, then I remember why.

Bruce Ickes worked as a steel erector, a newspaper editor and more recently as a public high school English teacher for 32 years. Occasionally he bestirs himself and attempts to write something that might be of interest to others.

Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.
– Vincent van Gogh

I plunge my script pen into green ink:

Chlorophyll flows through my veins
and tints each sentence. In sunlight
I photosynthesize. Fertility. Freshness.
Vincent brushed “Roses” in hues of
moss, lime, and olive greens. I recall
an olive grove two millennia ago.
I build Oz’s Emerald City

facet by facet.

Why do I see you through green eyes?

The writer has written secular and sacred verse for many decades. He’s appeared in Third Wednesday, THEMA, Prairie Messenger, The Christian Century, The Merton Seasonal, The Raven’s Perch, Kakalak, and forthcoming, The Orchards Poetry Journal. He is a septuagenarian, happily married, “Poppy” to two granddaughters, and volunteers at a prison camp. He is at petercvenable.wordpress.com

Unlike prose,
poems don’t stretch
from one side of the page
to the other.

Lines stop where they do
for balance,
for rhythm,
or for emphasis
or because if they don’t
then the finished product
won’t look like a poem.

For what poetry
lacks in popularity
it makes up for in shape.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, who likes to collect early editions of Mad Magazine and arts books and still reads an actual newspaper on a daily basis.

In its dying moments
A chameleon’s colour
Will flux furiously
In a rainbow of panic
Neurons and electricity
Bursting in ecstasy
As the lights go out

And I am both in awe
And fearful:
Will my own passing
Be so chaotic
Will my own skin
Be so beautiful?

Danny Sorby is a British poet living in Hong Kong.

A flood of warmth surprised me
when your e-mail popped right up
among the mundane messages
that daily crowd my box.

I’m happy that I know you, that
our lives have crossed, crisscrossed.
Thank you for remembering
a friendship never lost.

Mary Hills Kuck is a sometimes-poet who takes her work relatively seriously, having found time to write after years of teaching English and German in the US Midwest, Jamaica West Indies, and US New England. For five years, she has been tutoring an Afghan mother of five who migrated to Massachusetts. After almost a lifetime elsewhere, her Midwestern prairie roots keep her grounded.

Two otters turn together in the water,
dip and rise, deeper and longer,

aquatic acrobatics,
rolling over and over.

They climb and sliding off nearby rocks,
relishing the glide, the sudden rush of cool water.

With eyes closed, they swim faster,
directed forward, diving for small fish on their way.

They dart ahead in the early blue night
brown fur shining at the river’s surface.

They go, streamline and direct,
bubbles form around them.

Then they pause, eyes discerning and alert,
before easing onto their backs.

With the sun on their bellies,
They gaze at the pink sky above.

They lie there, floating,
heads peeping just above the water line.

More otters gather – draw close to form a shelter from the wind
They grasp paw to paw, gently flowing on their backs.

They connect in touch;
in the still, clear, light.

Dorothy Johnson-Laird is a poet and social worker who lives in New York City. She received an M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dorothy also works as a music journalist with a passion in African music. She has published journalism with www.afropop.org and www.worldmusiccentral.org, among others. More of Dorothy’s poetry can be found at https://www.facebook.com/Dorothy-Johnson-Laird-Poet-106451582140735

“Look at that, Ed.”

“What?”

“My eggs…”

Mel and Ed were at the counter of AL’S DINER that Thursday morning, Ed with his usual oatmeal, and Mel with…

“Those aren’t over easy, Ed.”

To make his point, Mel poked at one of the exposed yolks with his fork, as he added several extra frown lines to his face.

“No they’re not.”

Ed looked away. Like most people, he and Mel preferred eggs easy, frazzled around the edges as well. Who wants to stare at two sunny-side-up yolks?

He had a view out the diner window which hadn’t been washed in the past year.

“Do you think I should send ‘em back?”

A return order?

How would Al feel about that as he worked and sweated in the cramped, greasy kitchen? As he refried the eggs, might he spit on the grill?

“Hey… Look at your car, Mel.”

“What?”

“Your car… Aren’t those starlings on it?”

The diner window offered a blurred view of the parking lot where three – and now four – starlings crapped on Mel’s car.

Mel hated starlings, even more than crows. And no one likes crows on a car.

“Look at the mess they’re making, Mel.”

Beyond the uneven parking lot was the rest of the world.

“Look at the birds in the sky there.”

A collection of starlings is called a murmuration. By contrast, a collection of crows is a murder of crows.

“Those birds certainly go for your car, Mel.”

The used Prius would need a coin-operated wash as soon as possible.

“It’s a hell of a world, Mel, when birds go after cars like that.”

“What?”

Mel seemed, well, lost, distracted. Was he trying to spot the car wash at the end of the street?

“The world out there.”

“The world, huh?”

“Yeah, look at it.”

Mel squinted. He hadn’t been to his optometrist in a while.

“You know, Ed, when you put it like that… It does make my eggs look a little better.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

“In a silent room, a hiss.
The sss slithers
through trampled fields
of felled hair cells,
snakes through hands
cupped over ears,
surfs undulant churns
of Marpac Dohms.

Tympanic sibilance transmutes rest
into tolerance,
mattresses into sonic pinboards,
beds of hissing nails,
electric impulses leaking,
sisses within floorboards.

Missed consonants obscure gist,
sense rendered senseless—
an empty yes in response,
please rephrase, say twice.

Brushes on snare.

Ambient masks smother, shroud
significance,
isolate listener within whispers,
within susurrus shush,
woosh sense into absence:
this hiss, a séance of noise,
in a silent room.

Stephen May is a writer based in Connecticut. His work has appeared in Belt Magazine, Rust + Moth, A Portrait of New England, and elsewhere.

Grandpa was a welder,
had a gift with high temperatures.
Percolator, always ready to boil.
He laid claim to fame by building
impenetrable fortresses.
They say how you do one thing
is how you do everything;
grandpa was no exception.
His children, precious metals,
his belt, a righteous torch.

Kathleen Pollock is an undergraduate at Utah Tech University. She returning to school have a twenty-year hiatus, renewing her affections with poetry.

What used to be a house is now a room. And in that room, what used to be a girl and then a mother is now an old woman in a recliner facing the western wall’s window. She listens for that strange bird call again. It frustrates her that she can’t place the call to the bird. She had heard it the day before and hears it again now.

Plants suffer on the windowsill from a lack of sunlight, but she often waters and talks to them. Just sweet encouragements and the like. She can help that, but can’t help the direction of the lone window and the little sunlight it provides the plants.

Beside the wilting plants are faces behind glass: a son and a daughter with their spouses and children, and another son and daughter who she will never see again because they’ve died years ago.

The faces behind the glass are just that: faces behind the glass.

They watch her do so little each and every repeating day that she almost feels embarrassed if one can feel that while all alone, but she watched everything; watched them grow up, nursed them all from her own body, cooked for them and cleaned up after them. Before she was an old woman she used to drive a car, a new used one every income tax season, and with that car she had picked them up from school when their bellies hurt or they burned up from a fever. Sometimes she left work early when they had an early dismissal from school. She lived a life doing everything for everyone, yet never getting anything done for herself. Now her children and grandchildren live with her in those picture frames yellowed and dusty.

            Though her room is small, she can’t move around like she used to. She wants to, but her legs disagree with her. Her lungs too. That’s what the oxygen tanks and tubes are for. The tubes would tangle her if she could move fast enough, so she shuffles her ever-cold feet, barely lifting them from the ground (which she tries to clean, but it still leaves her feet blackened like she walked over ash). It’s just tile. Gray tile and white walls and yellow dusty pictures.

            Outside of that western window she sees a tree that she’d love to hang a bird feeder from, and she thinks of how she’d stop the squirrels from stealing the seeds. She thinks a sun catcher would be pretty to look at it. She’d always wanted one, maybe in the shape of a dragon or a bee’s nest, but she never got one for Christmas. There wasn’t enough sun in this window anyway.

            She thought of all the things she wanted to do, which remined her of all the things she couldn’t do. Still, she will make do. As she always has. She rocks a bit in her recliner, sipping on hot instant coffee. She can’t muster the energy to put a full pot together anymore, and her doctor says she can’t have coffee anyway. But she could do what he can’t know.

The coffee is good.

She’s comfortable.

And while she can’t really go outside anymore, she listens again for that strange bird call, hoping soon to know what creature is making that sound. Little things like that keep her at the window.

Tyler is the author of HAVE MERCY and a former journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Penn State University, and a M. A. in creative writing with a focus on fiction from Wilkes University. He’s published multiple short stories and one of them, “That Time Aliens Made Us Vegan,” was nominated for the “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Award” in 2018.