when the word is spoken
it files the teeth to a sharp edge
butters the tongue
like morning news
almost always not as sweet
looks at you with doe eyes
a fawn in your arms
until it kicks its way free
an uninvited guest that won’t leave
until it has drained you of all you can say
all that you can imagine is out there
on the table like lines of coke that must
be snorted
all we can do is breathe deep and smell
the rotted with the too sweet
and listen to the drone in the ear
until it has finished speaking

Kevin lives in South Shore Kentucky. His poems have been found at The Lakes, Appalachian Heritage, Praxis magazine, Rockvale Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Plainsongs ad Coe Review.
He has had recent work published in Dragon Poet Review, Pangolin Review, Constellations and Inkwell Journal and work forthcoming in The Bookends Review and Heartwood Literary Review. Kevin was a finalist for the Mahogany Red Lit Prize.
His work in “Rubicon: Words and art inspired by Oscar Wildes De Profundis” was nominated for a Pushcart prize.

My son liked sea chanties
And my daughter liked Neil Young’s Harvest album
And Ennio Morricone.
They both liked Tom Waits.
In the limited time I had with them
I crammed all the learning about the finer things
That I could.

Someday in the future their significant others will ask them about me
And they’ll hear a song off of Bob Dylan’s Desire in their heads
Before they respond.

Whatever they say about me,
They better say I taught them well.

John Tustin is currently suffering in exile on the island of Elba but hopes to return to you soon. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

I know everyone hates the bradford pear
but there’s a cluster of them blooming
on the road to work
and when I saw them
for the first time this morning
I praised God
because when the bradford pear dies
it does so in a brilliant fire of red and orange
that flails madly
in the september wind
before, with a softness,
it stops breathing
and stands crucified for months
offering only sticks and debris for kindling
until one day you wake up
to the most pungent odor
as the white flowers open to the sun
which by Easter will be replaced with
plumes of green, thick green
and death overcome

Matthew Tyson is an English teacher, avid hiker, and family man from Alabama.

My love, you died before this plague,
before this confinement.

You would have hated it.
You were never one to be confined.

I can see you,
you would have worn a mask
because you were not a fool.
You would have worn one of your floppy hats,
because that was who you were.
Perhaps, a bandana around your neck as well.

But you would have been out walking.
You would have been checking on your friends,
perhaps bringing them groceries,
perhaps just cheering them up,
letting them know there was at least one person who cared.

Your daughter has a touch of your spirit,
which would have surprised us both when she was younger.
She has been sewing masks and delivering them
to hospitals, to workers still working.
She has delivered groceries to shut-ins,
including even that leftover, your husband.

I think it would please you to know that.

Perry L. Powell is a poet and author who is finding it all too easy to stay at home alone with his ghosts and his memories.

Three days into my stay,
you are given the ward bed
next to mine. We share dreams
and paint our fingernails
a bright Cha-Ching Cherry
for its promise of tomorrows.

Each week, your mom
brings us a new color:
Lavendurable,
The Power of Pink,
No Room for the Blues,
Can’t Be Beet!

Today, she hands me
Lights of Emerald City.
But you must have asked her
for a separate color,
because you paint yours
When Monkeys Fly.

A month later, both beds are empty.
Today, to your funeral,
I will wear Mermaid’s Tears.
My mother says it’s gaudy.
But you and yours
will love it.

Mary Kipps writes poetry for all age groups, in traditional forms as well as in free verse. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies across the U.S. and abroad since 2005. She is also the author of three Kindle eBooks of paranormal satire: “All in Vein”, “A Sucker for Heels”, and “Bitten: A Practical Guide to Dating a Vampire.”

On this earth it is the season when all the air is blue and filled with wet lungs.
Winter has carried the weight of old civilizations.

My Father and I are waiting again for Sebastian’s return.
We wait by the slate pined shores of the oiled Atlantic

He tells me, “Hope cannot reverse the salt from that old water.
It will still gather on our lips.”

Spring will brush this weight off,
When it is new like a flower that has held on to let loose from its green wrapped egg.

That’s when my father decides to build the fire near us now

With the dead pine in the water and the green skunk cabbage
that has climbed out finally between our neighbors’ gravestones.

He pulls it all up and all is combined into flame in front of us

My father drinks his coffee in the backyard and
we watch together the white smoke from its hotness spill through the air

to mix with the ash and old illness our ancestors
had brought who came here on the sick barges

It is the smoke and my father’s coffee
that brings them here today again to gather up together
to our gray sky where it will sit thick with the wetness of ancient illness.

The air has been left clinging to their empty words
Like breath clinging to the trichomes of a browning vine.

We will sit here watching the water
around us like a taste of soil

Until the birds of King Sebastian have returned.
They will have traveled as much as we have.
They will have traveled from those mountains of those islands in our ocean.

My father stokes the fire mass on our lawn now
with the stub of a new green pine bow, his coffee in hand.

M.P. Domingos joined the military a good bit of time ago to experience the real world before getting out. Neither have happened. He writes when he can, usually at the most inconvenient times on anything he has available to him. He edits at night on an old computer after the kids go to bed.

The roof’s pitch will return thrown balls,
but prepare for the unpredictable
stagger, the occasional catch
in the gutter.

Wind will push your bike downhill until
you learn balance: how to center, lean
into gravity’s air, never
too right, too left.

Shoelaces and neckties will fall into slop-knots:
uneven ends twisted and pinched,
tangled and forced into staying
a little while longer.

Pencils will guide your cursive into loops
that capture whitespace, points
directing the reader’s eye
to crooked lines’ ends.

Razor blades planted too deep will teach
proper pressure and easy stroke: curves
and patterns all yours to follow,
avoiding blood.

John Davis Jr. is a seventh-generation Floridian, a third-generation citrus grower, a second-generation educator, and a first-generation poet. He enjoys spending time in the outdoors with his family.

The street boys, lunging forward
in their fathers’ boots,
make noisy ados tonight in Tibriz.

The war that might’ve killed them
didn’t; the nation their uncles died for
in 1983 survives another night.

They want whiskey and internet pics
of Emily Ratajkowski in a red bikini;
they want Pokemon on the Avenue

of Martyrs and Wilson basketballs.
They sneak tobacco in their jeans
and cross the shadow of the mosque

where wildflowers break through
winter, purple and gold, like artifacts.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where St. Paul trode. He teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.