Dilemmas

My earplugs irritate my ears.
What’s worse, I wonder,
three-fourths asleep,
the screaming on the street below
or the whispering on the road
to my brain?

Doug Sylver’s writing can be found in Drifting Sands, The Sun Magazine, The New York Times and Fixator Press, among other publications. He is a recently retired public high school teacher in Seattle.

 

Behind and in Front of the Fence

Three forty-two, cells, stirring

Five twenty and cells, slinking through the slits

Cells on cells, seven ten and seeping so,

The slits and the squares, feeling at the close and opening.

Cupping at the curves and the caveats, kissing indentations, incisions burrowed in the
soles,

Cells on cells, body double. Coursing through the sheaf, the layers on the layers on the
layers,

Humming bristle in a trickle chorus

Over cells and cells and peeling peat, the petrichor

Eight fifty-six and still never still, heather still abrasive and bending to another bend

Brushed upon and brushing back, daypack, stickleback, sticking to that raw moan, sticking to cells on cells, humid, hollow, nine and eleven, twelve, one, two, three forty-
two

Flo Fitzpatrick is an amateur writer from the North of England, whose work has been published in Bending Genres Journal and Hot Pot Magazine.

A line from Youssou N’Dour

My nose runs, eventually syn-
chronizes with the nearby Alle-
gheny River & the cable cars of
memory — the funicular railway

in Wellington, the Perugia People
Mover. I am enamored of carriages
that pass in the day, especially
those that pause at the same station,

pointing in different directions be-
cause it means the observation time
will be longer. My eyes run across
the passengers in the carriage beside

me, hoping to see aspects of myself
among them since it is often said we
recognize ourselves in others. & if I
do, I slide down the window & say to

them “Please accept these biscuits as a
small token of recognition, along with
a metal bookmark & a TOAD attack,
fresh from the Cambridge Dictionary.”

Mark Young’s most recent books are Alkaline Pageantry, published by Serious Publications in
September, 2024; & The Magritte Poems which came out from Sandy Press in October.

New Year’s Eve

If velleities have their way, I will  
conquer a country. Citizenship is
only for devotees of liberty and letters.
 
Prerequisites: Be yourself.
You’re beautiful with your ivories.
You’re beautiful without them.
 
We rubberneck only the rictus.
If dentures matter to you,
you will manage them.

Pablum? Reification?
Let me be.
I’m lit up.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored eight books of poetry, his latest being Legato Without a Lisp (CLASSIX, an imprintof Hawakal, New Delhi, September 2024). His poetry has been published in over thirty-five countries andhas appeared in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He lives in Mumbai, India.
X @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems ||

Taste

Drifters eat grapes
in parked cars stacked with books,
while bathing their feet
in pure mountain streams.
Women feed babies
soot from their nails
to alienate their friends
who sing heavy metal anthems
in karaoke bars.
Socialites eat soup
with mafia dons
and cry like sopranos
when boxers spill blood.
Myself,
I eat at night,
behind tinted windows and shades,
so when the moon devours the sun
I can blitz my stomach
with armour-piercing rounds,
then cook pepperoni pizza
laced with vodka and knives
and feed it to my boy,
because I’m taking him down with me,
while cleansing my pallet.

Tim Frank’s debut chapbook is, An Advert Can Be Beautiful in the Right Shade of Death (C22 Press ’24)

Twitter: @TimFrankquill

Penchant For Dissipation

I do not do ‘Goodbyes’,
neither Walk nor Run
… I Disappear.
Cheshire Cat grin
lingering mid-air
whilst sleight-of-hand
fixing Escape Routes.
I Borrowed only
… I’m Investing
in each footfall
… Away.
I love (term loosely)
the Weightlessness
of ‘Past Tense’
… and the Fresh Air
of Open Doorways
… ‘Fond Farewells’
are for ‘other people’
… I’m all
Temporary Transactions.

(C-ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya)

Paul Tristram is a widely published Welsh writer who deals in the Lowlife, Outsider, and Outlaw genres.  He wrote his first poem as a teenager following his release from the (Infamous) Borstal ‘HMP Portland’, and he has been creating Literary Terrorism ever since. His novel “Crazy Like Emotion”, collection of shorter fiction “Kicking Back Drunk ‘Round The Candletree Graves”, and full-length poetry book “The Dark Side Of British Poetry: Book 1 of Urban, Cinematic, Degeneration” are all now available by Close To The Bone Publishing.

Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in Los Angeles. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press. His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, Pygmy Forest Press, and Unlikely Stones.

pipes

andy is
an old geezer

he’s hitting eighty-five

andy makes the rounds
from library branch to library branch

just to have something to do
in between trips to the dollar store

he greets the staff
likes he’s doing a roll call

oh, there’s darla!
oh, there’s jake!

andy votes republican
and smokes pipes

he likes it when we show him
pictures of rustic pipes on computer screens

only andy wonders why
the color of it on his printout
isn’t as vibrant as the one there on the screen

andy walks around the library
vexed by the complexity of the color wheel

oh, there’s samantha!
oh, there’s dave!

then he’ll fall asleep in one of the chairs
waking an hour later in a happy stupor

wanting to see the smooth pipes online

before he heads home for lunch
or to the dollar store

for a box of lemonheads
or maybe something sweet.

John Grochalski is the author of five poetry collections, three novels, and the novella Wolves of Berlin Play Amateur Night at the Flute and Fiddle Pub (Alien Buddha Press 2024). He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Who? What? Why? (Where’s Your Evidence?)

I will start this off, but then move to afar..
“Where is my wealth,
just what is the problem, who can I turn to?”

Well, confront this mirror,
take a long stare, and what do you see?
If you lie it’s to thee;
you cheat at solitaire and
pretend you don’t see;

like letting your children always come first,
by fudging the board,
then hitting the world straight into a door 
that is usually open, but they still can’t afford.

“You’re the wrong class, your money’s too short,”
the banker sniggers, as you state your retort:
“I have what I have, just loan me some more”
“Password and email, how long have you lived there?
And can you remember. .your five previous doors?”
“Think it was S6 something, something..”
“Sorry, sorry sir, but that just won’t do..”

Andrew Portman is a sometime poet and writer based in Sheffield, England.

Undressed Gardens

Bells pause stick figure ennui
in the clouded vestibules of
another bonfire ragamuffin
sentry engulfed in yacking
standardized marble rye. Eek,
dripping like a mangled tome
carrying excited ventricles
throughout comatose car wrecks.
An abysmal squid, drunk, also
sauntering, mainly verbally
opaque.

Transparency would not taint
our fuselage dipsticks unless
tarantula humming were left
beneath the trailblazing jets
slowly sinking. Wanton, used,
catching streaks of permanent
staplers. Once, revoking globes,
the tiresome affidavit did a
granular spit take. Nervously,
another flyball corpse shouted
into the socialist void lipstick
avalanche.

Within our diabolical trends,
newly appointed surgical runts
basked in the enigma of a glue
sniffing rainbow. Smirk. Jump.
Narrow, though frolicking. If
our stamp collections could
speak in tongues, we’d bury our
microphones in the makeshift
cherry sequences.

Irrational lungs squelch yawns.

Misstated futuristic uncles spraying
fertilizer into the nostrils of paint
can hurdles. Desiccated shoehorns
maintain impervious ear canals
while shrugging. Into the fire,
out of the hovel, before an otter
has time to look up.

Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer. He is a member of C22, an experimental writing collective. He is the author most recently of O! fragmented glories (Argotist Ebooks) and Prismatic Fissures (C22 Press). He has had numerous pieces published in various journals. You can find links to his published work at joshuamartinwriting.blogspot.com