a stone come to rest
fashioned with loving hands
It is a harmony of sea and wind
In a woman’s shape

It’s as if the artist knew the woman without touching her
without seeing her naked
just imagining

Dorothy Johnson-Laird is a poet, social worker, and activist who lives in New York City. She received an M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dorothy also has a passion for African music and has published music journalism with www.afropop.org and www.worldmusiccentral.org. Of late, she has been intrigued by the small in writing, making a powerful statement in just a few lines.

Structure chisels
piety from chaos
sacred from clay.

Children so alive corrected
for uniform educated
knee-bending.

Fve-year-olds fidget
bodies cry out for sanctuary
on the other side of the door.

I should pull them out
and put them in trees
to sleep the afternoon with cardinals

and dreams of carnivals, screeching or silent as the sky determines.

I have not obstructed water when it should run.
I have not extinguished a flame when it ought to burn.

But I leave them there
for fear of what this world does
to children who live in trees.

Jessica Tilley Hodgman is a writer and historian living near where she was born in Roswell, Georgia. She studied history and world religions to consider the various myths we create so we can look at our pasts, make some sense of our present, and not be so afraid of the future.
Her essays, short stories, and poetry draw on childhood experiences in the rural South and adult experiences in the urban South.
She is currently collaborating on a collection of essays on the long-term immigrant experienced in metro Atlanta. Also—a short story about a lovable septuagenarian murderer.

Despite intimidation it has its way.
Still, from a closet with a one-way
window, you scrutinize that self—
helpless, though reluctant to crack
the door, peel off into that space,
fisticuff that thief into submission,
some admission, since if you did,
there’d always be a next you, back
in the dark, seizing the emptied seat
opposing the pane of introspection.

D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. Recently retired from college teaching, James lives with his wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

I’m the Bride of Frankenstein’s mechanic.
She drives a Toyota Echo.
It’s been a good little car.
I can’t recall doing any major repairs to it.
I asked her how it was for room,
What with her husband, the monster, being a big guy.
She said it was fine, no worries,
But then added, with a sparkle in her eye,
That it might be different when there’s a little Frankie.
I asked her about the gearbox.
She said it was hard finding reverse sometimes.
‘It’s a fault with that model’, I replied.

We could talk about a lot of things:
Life, death, marriage, body parts…
But I stick to cars.
It’s what I know best.
She’s been talking about getting an electric car.
Says it’s the way to go –
Electricity.
I guess it’s what she knows best.

Bruce Greenhalgh lives in Adelaide, South Australia where, amongst other things, he reads, writes and recites poetry. His work has appeared in anthologies, journals and online… He is yet to master being ‘fashionably late’ or being ‘the life of the party’. Some things are just beyond him.

The hillsides hang, coral-stained,
their heavy drapery this simple
space enfolds, inverts the coppery
moonrise skies and softly gathers dust.

Quietly, the ragged ridge advances
on my clamorous quiet, invests this
place, encroaches on each instant’s
insubstantial, its inviolate defenses.

We are made earth, made stone,
made skin in this approximation:
made self, made place by the outside-
in that each inviolable self unselves.

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.

As a child,
night surrounded everything outside;
even the daytime woods were wild,
no places I could hide.

Now, clumsy collisions in the dark
are mainly what I have to dread—
to stub a toe or bark
a battered shin. The dead

are closer to me now. Woodland trails,
once gained, are in the past, the roots, the rocks.
All matter threatens me travails—
a trundle down the hall in no-slip socks,

a drip and trolley at my side,
a chair, a bed the goals of day and night.
It is the errant step I must avoid.
It’s not a welcome sight.

Although a poet since his 30s, Wheelock’s intense immersion in the writing of poetry is relatively recent; his lifelong career has been in music, as a composer of chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at Smith College. He lives with his wife Anne in an old house at the edge of a hayfield in Whately, Massachusetts.

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.