Issue# 10

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Ascent, Reed, Arkansas Review, Poem, Slant, Aethlon, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Roanoke Danse Macabre, Ohio Journal, Sou’wester, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Texas, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Adirondack Review, Connecticut River Review, Delmarva Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Maryland Literary Review, George Washington Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ann Arbor Review, Plainsongs, Chiron Review, George Washington Review, McNeese Review, Weber, War, Literature & the Arts, Poet Lore, Able Muse, The Font, Fine Lines, Teach.Write., Oracle, Hamilton Stone Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, Cardiff Review, Tokyo Review, Indian Review, Muse India, Bombay Review, Westerly, and many other journals.Gale has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.

We’ve all been lonely.
Here’s how it happens.
On the street corner,
where greenery shadows the red stoplight.
At the farmer’s market, blending in;
or up on the Ferris wheel at the county fair,
whizzing by like you’re 
without a care. At
the diner with good black coffee.
The eggs benedict smiling up on the plate. 
Driving past the wood pile 
near a suburban house.
The scent of garlic on fingers.
Oh,
to find the smoke of some loved one’s absence
everywhere.

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Most recently, her work has appeared in Poetry Pacific, The Bluebird Word, Setu, morphrog, Magma, Otoliths, Flights, The Fabulist, Highland Park Poetry’s Odes anthology, and more.

There’s a good to you
when you leave your apartment.
You’re in your flat-soled shoes.
You’re walking.
Wind’s blowing through your hair.
You stop for a homeless woman,
drop a five-buck note in her hand.
A block farther along,
you try to regret what you’ve just done
because you could really
have used that money.
But you can’t.
Goodness overwhelms all compunction.
You almost wish you’d given more.
In the store, you find 
you’re a little short 
so you have to put three things back
on the shelf.
No matter.
You’re still good.
Whatever you don’t have enough of,
it won’t be goodness.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Mixed Mag, The Mantle and The Art Of Everyone.

Acorns are gone,
swept away.
People in graves
marked for the 1800s
had no idea
what the 21^st century
would be like.
And I’ll never see
the 23^rd or 89^th
or anything on the horizon.
But the sky
is still trembling blue,
exasperatingly blue
and trees line the roads
like they very well might have
even in that time.

This doesn’t feel
like an 1800s cemetery.
It’s carved
out of the city
and could remain
a secret source
of boiling over blue skies
and mating butterflies,
masking and elongating time.
I’m here
for only 
the faintest 
sliver of time,
while thoughts and ideas
and comforting blue skies
traverse the eons.

Published previously by New Reader Magazine.

Stephen Schwei is a Pushcart-nominated Houston poet with Wisconsin roots, published in Wax Poetry & Art, Beneath the Rainbow, Hidden Constellation, Borfski Press, and the New Reader Magazine. He has published one volume of poetry, Bluebonnet Whispers. A gay man with three grown children and four wonderful grandchildren, who worked in Information Technology most of his life, he can be a mass of contradictions. Poetry helps to sort all of this out.  www.stephenschwei.com

The wedding cake looked like a coffin
for an infant, all pink and white fondant,
under a smother of snow white blooms.
The groom wore a chalky blue tuxedo
that weakened his chin and tinted his skin
and gave him a generally terminal bearing.
The best man’s hair looked amniotic, 
his lip-licking eye-popping manner lubricious.
The bride resembled a wild mad bird,
flapping her wings and squawking 
about the flowers, the flowers—there
weren’t enough flowers: two sombre violinists 
stroked out a contrapuntal Bach thing
and bridesmaids in yellow chiffon singsonged.
I stayed cool through clanking toasts 
and foolish jokes that crashed like albatrosses.
I nodded and smiled at the slurry
rhetorical salads of Rob Roy speechifiers,
and I slowly rose and lightly applauded
the jubilant couple’s stiffish first dance
to Luther Vandross’s If Only For One Night.
They had chosen to be made one flesh,
at least for that moment in time: no one
can watch a hawk streak across the sky
and from its flight predict the future.
I drifted off to a mossy place in my skull,
where luscious clusters of grape dripped juice
and ripe peaches and pears thumped about me.
The groom’s mouth sealed the bride’s
in a final public show of their cupidity,
though after ten seconds she pushed him away
in order to draw breath and wipe off her face.
I sat at a table with thick-tongued strangers,
both legs having dozed off during the speeches.
And while I could not rise at that moment,
I could neither rest nor be idly content
with the situation: my bladder agreed. 
As I waited for the pins and needles to recede
an intensifying waft of rotting flowers clashed 
with the sudden and magical arrival of dessert.
As the others savaged their baked Alaska, 
I slowly rose, hoping no one asked who I was.

Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and satirist.

Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry.  Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One, Sheila-na-gig, and other journals. You’re invited to visit her website to read more of her work. 

They’ve found a shady spot on this
summer day. His hat tipped back 
on his head, he reads the news
to his sweetheart. Her flowered 
hat bouquets her silken hair
and rosy cheeks. She rests her 
hands on his strong shoulders, her
long white dress a drapery of calm.
Her little dog pants next to her red shoes.
This moment of peace, 
this segment of serenity, 
this prelude to the tragedy of love.
Thirty years later he has ladies in other 
towns, none as important as she, he 
assures her. She is as bored as Madame 
Bovary. Her bodice has adorned many 
dressing tables. Memories of other lovers 
fill the flaccid spaces between them. 
Hatred envelops them like a chrysalis of ordure. 
When they hatch, they fly together
in crazed ogees, chasing one another,
each trying to wear the other out, each
caught in a spiraling aeronautics of doom.

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022). His poetry has been nominated three times for both the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.

The Brewster’s Ladies’ Library started
by two ladies 150 years ago
is still going strong. My mother
volunteers there, holds the record
for the most volunteer hours worked
during the year.
“I love this place,” she says
as we leave the book stacks and wander back
into the newspaper reading room
with its musty newspaper smell. An old man
in a heavy brown coat, slouched down
like a crumpled walrus in a big leather chair,
doesn’t even glance up from his newspaper
as we enter the room.
But I can see the slight smile
as he overhears my mother’s reverent voice
talking about the library, with its quiet corners
and sacred spaces. “I love this place,”
she says again as she takes
my arm, the color rising in her cheeks.
My dad would be proud of her I think,
taking such good care
of all these books.

Michael Estabrook’s most recent collection is Controlling Chaos: A Hybrid Poem (Atmosphere Press, 2022). Retired now writing more poems and working more outside, he just noticed two Cooper’s hawks staked out in the yard or rather above it which explains the nerve-wracked chipmunks. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts. https://michaelestabrook.org/

Flames in winter, buds in spring, 
summer’s rose, autumn’s gold leaf, 
our kisses.  Neither of us has a car. 
I have a driver’s license, you have too, 
but we walk a lot.  I’m not going to lie, 
you’re the world’s best kisser. 

We ride bicycles out to Lake Harriet 
and sit under an elm, all these trees wish 
to be with you. Your eyes enchant mine.  
A Sunday afternoon in May, a different lake, 
a different tree. Our kissing on a train?  
The ride itself happens, 

and your eyes, nose and mouth.
No eyelashes lovelier than yours. 
One morning as you sleep I kiss your lips.  
Our first kiss, near a big white house 
on a corner, a late night snow falling, 
you’re the miracle.

Peter Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is forthcoming from Better Than Starbucks Publications.
An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.