Grammar lesson

Irregardless, they say
is redundant
repetitive
two negatives
too negative.
Irregard?
Is that better?
Or regardless?
I don’t care
what they say.
I love you
irregardlessly.

Doug Sylver has had jobs as a bike messenger in New York City (for a few months), delivering newspapers on the streets of Paris (for a few days), and as a public high school teacher in Seattle (for almost thirty years). All that time he has tried to write.

Capitulation will be tomorrow’s song

Halfway through the movie, the
voice track shifts into Spanish,
the soundtrack becomes a caca-
phony of Panzer tanks while
images of them intermittently
appear that have little relevance
to the storyline. Then birds sur-
face on the windowsill, ballet
dancers replace the shots of
Panzers, & Shostakovich’s Jazz
Suite, Waltz No. 2 rolls out from
the wings to roll over & de-
molish the threatening tanks.

Mark Young’s most recent books, all published this year, are the downloadable pdf, The Hit List,
published by Scud Editions; Gravel (with harry k stammer & Mark Cunningham), from Sandy
Press; Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama, from Otoliths; another downloadable
pdf, Closed Environment, from Neo-Mimeo Editions; & The Complete Post Person Poems, also
from Sandy Press.

Luis was born in Mexico, lives in California, and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His latest chapbook, Make the Light Mine, was published by Kendra Steiner Editions. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Mad Swirl, Unlikely Stories, and Yellow Mama Magazine. 

Kiss

a weapon to pull the moon from the sky icebreakers crushing frozen seas into sharp
shards mosquito swarms with new sickness caught from cadavers alpha omega brainworm lay
larvae in hair like woodsmoke tongue hot ice tulip poplars toppled into Gulf Stream tide pools
hands tremble together fingernails growing in unison from receding riverbeds after a pause neck
caress hair back from ears another moment caught in traps of downy skin whisper skin aging
skin by seconds touching again and touching more and more to come

JB Malory is a writer and musician based in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Since 2008, JB has released music and toured with the post-punk/industrial band, Pop. 1280. He has previously lived in England, New Zealand and China. His fiction has appeared in Terraform.

Matching coffee

Mugs in City Mission
Store:
Best Grandma
and Grandpa ever
Not needed now
Mine was someone
else’s once

Alan Catlin is a six decade warrior of the small press scene.  He has pomes in recent issue of Beatnik Cowboy, Home Planet News, Chamber Magazine and Synchronized Chaos. He has full length books forthcoming from Roadside Press, Impspired and Kelsay Books.

Corrective

Pain anointed its impression sooner
than I could synthesize its import.
As age embraced me
I learned to paw my way
to the lair of liminal space.
Not far from
the lollipop man of childhood.
Lor, making oneself scarce
is an infelicitous thought.
The finer course
is to accept the affliction.
Welcoming it is the antidote.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored eight books of poetry. His poems have been published in over thirty-five countries and have appeared in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press in the UK. He lives in Mumbai, India.

X @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems ||

To My Knowledge

Business is a perk affording 
hubris as debris. Debride the nearest
epiderm. A berm. Welcome aboard
and room in lower case.

Do you impose yourself
in absencia? Pop (poof) goes 
proof of chase. Of purr. 
A rounded cat. A tat. The calico half fact. 
Good at fractions. 

Each might picture surgical disruption.
A bus ride versus clean glide 
in sterile steel glass 
rubbed clean.

A brief history of independence: 
Leisure mood, a mode, a modular homing.
Craved once ceased to crave.
As equals. A raven grave. A graven rave.
A culture in the throat. 
Insignia to tell others oaths.

Sheila E. Murphy has a book forthcoming from Lavender Ink: Escritoire. Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy

Owed Nothing

I cut the world’s sunflowers. Bind them
In rubber. Hide them in brick and plaster
Heads reaching.

I trash paint cans, kitty litter crystals
Trap solvents, absolve my laziness.

Am I owed nothing or something or
Choice. I shove

Bottles into hands. I work for those hands.
Raising a future without me.

The world owes you something you think

But caterpillars chew
Butterflies stretch
My lantana is watered
And waiting.

Krista Puttler has been fortunate to call many places home including the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, and a stateroom on an aircraft carrier. Her writing has appeared in As You Were: The Military Review, Collateral, Intima, Cagibi, and Cleaver Magazine, among others. A medium-roast coffee gal at heart, she is pleasantly surprised by how much she loves Italian espresso. She lives outside Naples, Italy with her husband and three daughters. You can read more at kristaputtler.com 

Witch Hazel

When this hemorrhoid
is finally vanquished,
it won’t be
the pain,
the blood,
the itchiness,
the dryness,
the insomnia,
or the weird prickly sensations in my thighs and dick
that I’ll be
glad are gone:

Even though it
soothes me,
I’ll be glad 
to never have
to bear the
stench of using
Witch Hazel hemorrhoid pads
ever again.

GARRET SCHUELKE is a writer, podcaster, and musician that currently resides in Grand
Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of the GODAN series (Bakunin Incorporated), Anamakee
(Riot Forge Studios, 2016), Whup Jamboree: Stories (Elmblad Media Group, 2017), and three
ebooks.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Fixator Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.