2 POEMS – Caroline Reddy

Pods I sit on a black cushion and wonder if the electric pulses I feel are lightbody healers transmuting energy through the crevices we have created with our breaths to make us whole again. I rest my head on a pillow and imagine if the infinite impulses I feel are silver starseed-pods traveling through the […]

2 POEMS ~ Bradford Middleton

OH PHALLUS OF RIDICULOUSNESS Oh phallus of ridiculousness you tower over our town like a monolith fucking the sky as the denizens fuck with themselves anyway we can. Some chose to shop whilst I try to forget as life moves on in a drunken wasted state towards my ultimate escape and a place where life […]

Continental Breakfast La Quinta Jackson Mississippi – Tim Staley

Continental Breakfast La Quinta Jackson, Mississippi There’s a sadness in heart-shaped waffles, in the cool flickering logs, in the tower of Styrofoam tended to by a brown person. There’s petroleum in the apparel, haircuts and politics of the others. There’s blunt force trauma in the space-age gravy, in the Fruit Loops from a wheel, in […]

EVERYDAY THINGS – ANDREW HUBBARD

Everyday Things We’re still getting used to the new house: How the blinds work Whether the couch belongs where we put it How to set the thermostat Where the good dishes go (In a marriage-defining moment My wife said, “I want guests To see them, but I don’t want it To look like we put […]

5 POEMS – LANE CHASEK

Talking about weather they say meat substitutes are spies like prose poems or undercover agents who can’t keep their mouths shut, who keep talking about the weather meanwhile my grandpa died the way he lived— talking about the weather, flirting with nurses, dead-set on never letting tofu pass his lips when you live in a […]

A RARE AND DIFFERENT TUNE – A PRE ORDER OPPORTUNITY FOR OUR READERS

Forthcoming from Beatlick Press in September 2021 “In his stunning sophomore effort, The Pieces You Have Left, Tim Staley brings you to the woods and asks you to stay the night. In this moving and fast-paced collection, Staley touches on an array of subjects–space travel, love, fatherhood, masculinity, death, solitude, youth, and dementia–delving deeper than ever […]

After I See Your Post About Visiting L.A. – James Croal Jackson

After I See Your Post About Visiting L.A. I reach out– longing for connection. When surrounded by seagulls, I look for the first semblance of friend. Not that we have much to anchor anymore, conversationally. Dolzani’s English class. I didn’t read assigned books. Didn’t become The Old Man and The Sea. So many years to […]

TRANSPLANTS – Stephen Mead

Transplants Supply and demand—- Two coats, even in July, one wool, hooded, the other matching sweat pants. Underneath? Long johns. Feel better? He needed air, on bad days especially, especially when the tide came in, when the wheelchair was too obdurate, when effort was a graft some small hope provided and waiting was […]

3 POEMS FOR JUNETEENTH BY TIM STALEY

After Ahmaud Arbery 3.23.20 His arrival here cut one background from another. Five hands sprung from each of his wrists. I wipe the ashes off the armoire. I light a new stick of incense Morning Star Mellow Pine. He sits on my sofa deliberately. The muscle spasm in his leg ribbons the room. From the […]

Gravity Grateful -Mark Blickley

“Gravity Grateful” Looking down from high places doesn’t bother me at all but when I have to look up at things, like buildings, it makes me nervous cause it feels like some kind of force like a magnet or something is going to pull me up and lift me off the ground which is a […]

Cacti Fur

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