The Rope’s End

The doctors told us to strip to our underwear.
Mine – out at the waistband – long past white –
barely hung on my emaciated body.

They ordered us to stride long and fast
in circles around the carpet to make a quick
assessment of our healthiness.
A lung infection forced me to cough and wheeze.

They poked and grabbed us one after the other –
making further assessments –
and finally I put my threadbare and smelly
clothing back on.

They let me in – I was judged fit enough
to go to Navy boot camp.

But of course my sick and malnourished body wasn’t fit.
They’d let me in out of pity.

Even the most detached observer could see
I’d run out of alternatives and ended up in that
Military Enlistment Processing Center
because I had no where else to go.

I hated every minute of
the pitching and rolling arduousness
on that gray-hulled destroyer –
and it all began with an act of
sympathetic kindness
from a doctor who saw
that last inch of rope my life was dangling by.

Hugh Blanton combs poems out of his hair during those moments he can steal away from his employer’s loading dock. He has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Scarlet Leaf Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, and other places. He lives in San Diego, California.

Some Other Thing

Putting aside for the
moment that all things
were at some other time
some other thing, I set
out on a dance that may
or may not have been
Ray Charles singing
When your lover has
gone, a poem spread across
two pages, the glaze on
a Japanese bowl, water
caught by sunlight, snow
on low mountains, or
a crow croaking its anger
from the next door
mango tree which has
not yet come into flower.

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, creative non-fiction, & art history. Books published so far this year are from 1750 words, from SOd Press; sorties, from Sandy Press; & The Toast, from Luna Bisonte Prods.

Brian Jones Died in Winnie the Pooh’s Swimming Pool

A.A. Milne was the home’s previous owner, 
best known as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, 
and then Brain moved in soon after his split from the Stones, 
started drinking heavily and fighting with the builders 
he had hired so that Brian Jones died in Winnie-the-Pooh’s 
swimming pool after the job foreman held him underwater 
just long enough that there was no longer any argument 
over shoddy construction or monies owed 
to Mick or Keith or Piglet  
or anyone else. 

Munitions

Half a dozen ratty kids in tatters  
tossing off-coloured bricks at one another.  

Old faces, even for the kiddies.  
Scarred with slanderous tongues.  

The bigger ones atop pyramids of rubble  
while the smaller ones duck  
and throw a few bricks back feebly.  

A derelict munitions factory    
with much of the old line work   
still in place.  

The children all at war  
as they wait their turn.  

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, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Somewhere Else

I live more than one life.
I know I am just one person.
It is a proven fact I can be
in more than one place at
once or do you think I am mad?

I have traveling souls and
I know so do you. I want you
to believe that we exist, you
and I, and them, our souls.

The traveling souls make
their way north and south. I
do not dispute this. Try to
ignore them, but there is
nothing you can say to change
my mind. I am somewhere else.

The Wild Side 

Take a walk,
the wild side
will follow

in these streets
where shadows
become real.

Take a walk.
Be happy
when you are

home in one
piece because
some people

do not make
it back home
like they should.

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.

latchy king boat (a hand in the water)

brain in the box to go
the kingship watkins

the young mustard
the croaking lemur

in the salad eye
let me be the world

when you do, you don’t
a series of wet napkins

the night of the walking nothing

the spider waits for the spider-man to run thru the sandwich hall

a concord of the smith to share a sainted hello
that meatloaf is the pen of the pocket

            that languishing frost
            that lemon squint

the clay of the mortal robe
the pucker of the small earth

language is the paper of the wolf in the tree

Godot

In the wrong station
that bleeds away
the railway profits,

on an iron bench
painted dim,
and although its
colourants have been
peeling away
you can tell it is green,

sits Mr Godot,
and the time frozen in
one John Smith & Sons Midland
grieves for the late sun.

I have a sign breathing his name
in my molten hands
in the mirror-station to his,
and I yawn, it is quite late.

The Behaviour Pattern of The Illusions

Midnight shakes me awake
just before I fall asleep,
and I move the window’s curtain a bit,
see five of our neighbours
sitting in our front yard looking at my house.

I have a gun by my imagination.
I keep it locked in my conscience.
The summer whistles as the dark
reaches the boiling point.

And then, in the same night
I open the curtain with all my might;
my muscles ache and ring;
I find nothing but the darkness outside.
No one faces me when I feel
the strength to face them.

An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited a magazine – ‘Words Surfacing’, authored seven volumes including ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’. His works have been translated in ten languages.  

Find and follow him at amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoetAuthor Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

the old butchery 

my father and i waited on a red light when i noticed 

a building being demolished 

“i bet lots of hobos slept there” i said 

“that’s the old butchery” he said 

“i never knew that. what happened to it?” 

“they found severed dog heads in their barrels” 

“no shit” 

“it was all over the news. dog heads mixed with pig heads” 

“so that means…” 

“yeah, they used dog and pig meat to make their sausages” 

i glanced at the building again and heard him laugh. i turned. 

“your nonno bought sausages there” he said 

“no way. he liked that shit?” 

“well, he didn’t know. we didn’t know” 

“you ate them too?” 

“yeah. no idea how many dogs we must have eaten those days” 

the lights turned green and we left the building behind. 

i turned my head to see it one final time. 

i said a silent prayer for all the stray dogs butchered in there. 

many of them had owners waiting to no avail for them to return. 

hell, and why not a prayer for the damn pigs? 

i said one for them too. 

the building was now long gone from my view, 

and the next one i saw had a big sign that read 

“CARE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. DO NOT LITTER” 

i pulled my phone out and opened the notepad 

“dear god” i wrote “i don’t know what the fuck to tell you” 

and slipped it down my pocket again. 

Giovanni Mangiante is a poet from Lima, Peru. His work appears in various journals such as Three Rooms Press, As It Ought to Be, FEARLESS, Synchronized Chaos, and more. He has upcoming poems in The Piker Press and Studi Irlandesi. He lives with his dog, Lucy. In writing, he found a way to cope with BPD.

Where broken objects gather.

walking through a house
where nobody has visited
in three years or more
and finding not much
very special at all: just things
which remind you
of things. books
on bookshelves, glasses
and dusty cups – something in the fridge
which may have been cheese
or an animal, trapped
and choked on hunger. posters
put up when you were 12
with thumbtacks
and a ziplock on a rabbit
still stuffed with secret pennies. the beds
all mildew, radios
which play cassettes. our place in leitrim
where broken objects gathered,
like a bend in the river
lodged with shells and rocks. you open doors
and remember how they opened, open windows
and remember
how they stick.

Scales.

sunlight in fog,
just sheets
on a washing-line.
I walk to work, shoes on,
hand
in a pocket
and hand
on the strap of my bag.
my face turns steadily
like a shadow in sunlight,
turns
toward the pavement.
the grey
strikes up and curls
and goes forward;
my steps making scales
like dead fish
in a marketplace
stall.

DS Maolalai has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019).

A DISTURBING DAY

The phone rings
Waking me,
It’s half-8 Saturday morning
Another lost in all-consuming hangover oblivion
And once I answer I’m back off to bed minutes later
Only to be roused by a loud LOUD banging
Just a few moments later.

What the fuck is that noise I beg to the sky as
Drums march through my destroyed mind
As outside its carnival time and I know the
Misery will not stop until it’s all gone
And the promise comes that it will last hours.

Back here though the sound is dimmed
And today I’d rather just hole up
Ignoring the party outside where no doubt
The beautiful will be posing and the
Crazies will be dancing and I’ll be sat here
Reading some outlaw poetry.

Bradford Middleton was born in London in 1971 but didn’t begin writing poetry until he moved to Brighton during 2007.  He knew no-one and had no money so it helped fill his nights.  Now widely published in small press circles if you like go be his friend on Facebook @bradfordmiddleton1. 

expand

expand its pointed little head
let’s see what fits
and if we have enough
particles at our disposal
we may find blessings
stretched like rocks along
the removable shorelines
but a buttered
sculpture may
do the trick to
wary our skeleton
keys turned out
so as to be all
rendered glories
& removed
in our
far
and final swiping
toward a fluttering cape
of spun flaxen delights
a sightless ringless toneless
stop sign painted RED
for the vowel that displaced
a million squabbles grilled
to charred perfection

Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library.
He is the author of the book Vagabond fragments of a hole (Schism Neuronics). He has had pieces previously published in The Vital Sparks, Breakwater Review, Ink & Voices, The Free Library of the Internet Void, and Paragraph Line. His films have screened at various film festivals including The Pineapple Underground Film Festival, New Filmmakers, Film Al Fresco, Views from the Underground, and The Shooting Wall Film Festival.