Escritoire

I pick my nibs with confraternity in full frontal view, nodding away groupthink to
bring justice cleanly into clearer view. Preferring the easy, utile, clear-barreled Bic
over a choice Mont Blanc. Simplicity offers wealth in mind as monk-dom wholly
showing through. The body’s soul keeps on the down low. An adagio honoring the
baton tap of a prodigy claiming never to be lost. Hosting frost with farthings tossed
above ensembles held apart from lace and shoulder pads to trace.

 

Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent book is Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) She received the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy’s book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018)won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press.

Feedback Loop

Spring the dark shade
to ray in 2pm light.
Trying to feel better,
put perspective on things.
The dark thoughts
coming down again,
putting the body
in supine form.
Scribble down dark thoughts,
the lack of hope,
the why exist
when pieces ache, missing
in the world’s scaffolding.
Sketch reality,
grim under a patch of light.

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Most recently, she has contributed poetry to Wilderness House Literary Review, Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets?, New Feathers Anthology, The Nature of Things (Lone Mountain Literary Society), and more journals.

The New Saints

Go Forth!
Armed with humor
holy mischief
humble
sauciness
depleting
complexity
slaying AI
with humanity
and a simple
child’s questioning.

Randall Rogers is a US poet currently residing in Denver, Colorado.

Keep The Power To Yourself

Healing the Dissection
… ‘Open Book’…
your fault (shakes
spectating head
unsympathetically)…
STOP… No, Continue.
‘Coattailing’ is not
Group-Effort…
sharing anything with
selfish/greedy/self
-centred people is daft.
I need only one pair
of hands for this Raft
I’ve built from scratch.
We are only going
in the same Direction
because you’re follow
-ing… just one of us
knows the Destination
and I’m out in… Front.

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’ is now available by Close To The Bone Publishing.

TAKING OFF MY COAT

each evening
is like taking off my coat.
i sit down
apart from the day
and nothing happens.
i let silence sing
her supernatural note-
in the air, i drown
in how the lonely play
as reality slackens.
curdling in a chair
with arms of broken branches
that used to be
and went somewhere
in circumstance and chances-
now greying, like wild hair
at the end of all its dances
with the gravity
gone from its romances-
i feel time's weight
compress the emptiness of fate,
into some sort of nothing
that held my hand,
and left me something-
to understand.

Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford,
England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of
Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of
The Poetry Society, and nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his five published books of poetry  https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.

Indelicate Avenues

High Mass will be celebrated to
announce effective cooperation
with humans &, as an added
bonus, help get your banking
done. Those are now everyday e-
vents. Some are less likely. The
Maricopa County Jail facility is,
to put it bluntly, a shit hole; but
now that biofilters are removing
the sewage gas, & a freshly cleaned
painting that once hung in the war-
den’s office has been identified as
being by none other than Leonardo
da Vinci, I feel a new awakening.

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional
Juru land in North Queensland, Australia. He is the author of more than sixty-five books,
primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, memoir, and art history. His
most recent books are a pdf, Mercator Projected, published by Half Day Moon Press
(Turkey) in August 2023; Ley Lines II published by Sandy Press (California) in November
2023; un saut de chat published by Otoliths Books (Australia) in February 2024; and
Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in
March 2024.

Morgue

Where midnight hatched
from its alabaster egg
and the first bone was broken.
The origin of winters,
flesh purpled with snow,
void versus abyss,
obliteration in wedlock with oblivion.

Where death pens its screed,
reeking of formaldehyde,
each letter a tendon basket
brimming with knuckles and toes,
with what remains of us.

Here is where we count the wounds
and measure out life’s length of string,
the longest night outwitting summer.
Here is where we read your palm,
undermining the mound of Venus,
milking ichor from a slit to the wrist,
cataloguing the hollows of a heart,
its lack of red juice and oscillations.

Even the light is made of ice.
Even the Devil walks around this house,
this waystation of the soul,
this mystic corridor and its thousand doors.
Even Death won’t live here.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published
in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner
of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems
have been broadcast and performed globally.

old man asleep in the subway time to die

time for a ticket
to ride for
the strung out
far out
night crawling
joy boy riders
stretching their
thin white lines
to the limit
holding hands
with their
best friend
Mr. Jones
on an express
train to hell
that has no stops
before the end

Alan Catlin is a six decade warrior of the small press scene.  He his 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.

Shadowland

Below this world, and now and then indistinguishable from it, is another, no place anyone would
choose to go if they had a choice, where objects of longing recede ever further and memories
blow apart like smoke, where timelines have been indefinitely suspended, where God has our
own face but super magnified and children are strange puppets with painted eyes and wobbly
heads, where basic truths are conveyed, when conveyed at all, in conspiratorial whispers, where
even at the height of summer or the burning point of tinder, the shadows under the trees never
melt.

Howie Good is a poet and collage artist on Cape Cod.

A Stranger to These Lands

Know that this is no simple archetype
if a stranger should come to town,
break bread with those calloused traveller hands,
a persistent cough that could be construed as something deadly
in the wrong light; the warmth of shelter and company 
extended in kindness, curious children with their many questions
that go unanswered, whispered giggles of new opportunities –
seasoned walking stick on the lean in darkened corner,
impenetrable woven layers as befit the season;
a distrait cat licking itself by the door like a prized
and convincing waterfall.

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.