The Bottle in the Cosmic Ocean

In our vast language of signs
hoary old saws lost in translation
rattle around deep edges of the heliosphere

naked waving hello/goodbye
commentary on wildflowers
snatches of Bach and Chuck Berry

Miraculously it’s intentionless
birdsong the needle drops on first
scratching over bloviating human hi’s
from stern heads of state

Emissaries operating at odd frequencies
the birds make sense and the listener
focused on the far-flung message
buried deep on side 2

We adapted to this
whether we survived or not
is what they say between sweetness
sung so hard it sounds
like a worried come-on
to ears that parse the further warning

They are coming
working playing laughing crying
millennia from now still talking
telling everything about themselves
in long waves of endless celestial static

Will the intelligence we hope to reach
already know our deepest fears?
The loneliness of a planet
teeming with life
we barely understand.
Will they tolerate us politely?
Or will they turn out the light
and hope we go another way?

TONY BREWER is a poet, live sound effects artist, and event producer. He has
been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. His books include: The Great
American Scapegoat, Little Glove in a Big Hand, Hot Type Cold Read,
Homunculus, and The History of Projectiles. More at tonybrewer71.blogspot.com

 

Post Card from a Ghost Town Along Nowhere

If this reaches you before I discover an exit
& recommence my journey toward home
after a pause for imperative recalibration,
this starling will have proven its use after all.

Thomas Helm spoke with certain truth
when he said during his own odyssey,
“Perhaps this world was made for birds
But not for men.”

This place far north held beauty once
before nature reclaimed its territory.

With assumption, I’d throw a dart & say
after its greedy population got what it wanted
from mining sacred grounds for almighty dollar,
they abandoned it like they often do
when hormones got them horned up,
but Mother Nature had nothing left to give.

Tim Heerdink is the author of Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well, The Human Remains, Red Flag and Other Poems, Razed Monuments, Checking Tickets on Oumaumua, Sailing the Edge of Time, I Hear a Siren’s Call, Ghost Map, A Cacophony of Birds in the House of Dread, and short stories, The Tithing of Man and HEA-VEN2. His poems appear in various journals and anthologies. He is the President of Midwest Writers Guild of Evansville, Indiana.

The Language Of Flowers

In the blue light of a computer screen
I’d pretended to be asleep
while you held my foot, crying.

There were unspoken atrocities
bleeding through the layers
of your pajamas,

secrets you didn’t have the courage
to share, knowing in the end, I’d be
just as fickle as the rest.

Those nights in the dark, with me falling
between the makeshift mattresses,
I thought your touches were the language
                                                                                      of flowers.

I remembered all of their parts
disarticulated in your mouth,
whispered into my spine

with a wholeness that neither
of us could remember enough
to make it tangible.

And then at the airport,
I told you I loved you
as I walked away, jets drowning

out the words. You paused,
as if knowing, back stiffened
and shoulders rolled down
                                                              as I flew away.

Aleathia Drehmer was once the editor of Durable Goods and In Between Altered States, but now spends most of her time writing novels. She has recently published poems in Spillwords, Impspired Magazine, and Open Skies Quarterly. Aleathia has upcoming work in Piker Press, M 58 Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Cajun Mutt Press.  www.aleathiadrehmer.com

The Myth of Screaming

They say my father
could have gone pro,
or played college ball,
maybe Lasalle, West Chester,
and that he would never miss
as he swooped into the lane,
the Apollo of the family,
his jet black anemone
arm hair waving
in the summer pick-up games,
at the courts chipped
and broken next to the apartments,
his voice a grunting echo,
hands palm the ball
over the horizon of the swings,
jungle gym, sandbox
where once the black kid dove
headfirst, face covered in
hornet stings and panic, then
an ambulance blanket.
He came out of the same woods
where one night a truck
filled with hollering men
and rifles shot the trees
up for a mythical deer or spirit bear.
Each time my father
dribbles the ball between
legs, through mountains of bodies,
the story then peaks
with my mother’s voice,
more of her teeth, incisor gates
shut, portcullis trap,
oil pouring through the gaps,
my sister in tow,
short-haired, blonde,
pixie-Ariel, riding the fear,
a vulture gliding on the updraft,
watching as the volcano
splits the concrete of the court,
chip of gray blacktop pours
into a red crevice, Brucie
and Bryan’s dad Wally tumbles
first, Rory’s dad next, beer bottles
in long rows, soldiers holding
the innocent by-standers at bay,
as they fall, each one pushing
the other down in, the tinkle
of glass becomes a tiny scream,
as anger burns the myth
into the air, as my father
shoots his last shot, his body
in flight, arms aloft, rolled out
as the wing bones extended
into his aim. The ball, a sun
trying to set one last time.

C.L. Liedekev is a writer/propagandist who lives in Conshohocken, PA with his real name, wife,
and children. He attended most of his life in the Southern part of New Jersey. His work has been
published in such places as Humana Obscura, Red Fez, Open Skies Quarterly, River Heron
Review, and Vita Brevis. His real goal is to make the great Hoboken poet/exterminator Jack
Wiler proud. So far, so good.

Later Never Comes

In the storms of life, the
sky falls apart and lights
the hidden sun, an orange
pomegranate on the indigo

Shadow horizon, leaves
whisper to each other
in a secret language, do they
love the trees that caress and
cradle them through life

Time on earth is a Dancer’s
hunt for shelter, you are
my roof, fire, and blanket

Hearts are jigsaw puzzles
with missing pieces, can
you hear the teardrops fall
in a torrid cloudburst.

 

 

Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. His 30 years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Catfish is from Albuquerque and Milwaukee.

Schoolyard Rules

I think it was fifth grade
when the school bully
found a wallet on the ground 
during recess and decided
he’d keep it

but one of the teachers 
discovered what was going on
and took it from him 
saying, No…no…
this doesn’t belong to you
we have to return it
to its rightful owner 

he didn’t like that
not one bit
he grabbed at the wallet
as she held it aloft
and a crowd gathered 
surrounding her

the next thing I remember was her
screaming as she was shoved
into a fence over and over 
by this mob 
of pint-sized savages

while I watched
from an outer circle
stunned
paralyzed 

and later
we were pulled out of class
one by one 
into the hallway
and interrogated
about what we’d seen
and asked who was involved 
in this terrible thing

I can’t remember 
exactly 
what I said…
but I already knew
well enough

to say I hadn’t really 
seen 
what I had
seen

or else

Baton Met

The baton passes from left to right hand, anxious to be passed. With the anguish of the tether on the
precipice, I am thinking the full length of it: the damp, fluffed-out flame.

Still bag-like and sift, the local light of personality waits on the sofa for a soda. The stones tear at my
blue-striped job-hunting jacket, which I remove and throw into a floppy disk drive

The abominable snowmen still don’t know what to do about the lightning. Heads open at the top –
flakes updraft, in the bill-thick half-plops cracking; the neck of the river holds it together, glugs.

How like the moment the quake goes around the equator in no time – its old weight rubbing against the
marble.

2.

A sponge for insight isn’t carbon-quick enough to counter this coolly calculated warmed-up simile. It
grows filaments and forms stone dressing.

Between the collapsed cake of root energies to the tangled halo, its secrets are lodged protectively in
the kidney. The leaves split off from the slice of pizza. The star writhes in the stiffening cheese.

Saddled with moving-day clutter, a stick figure crawls out from the toroid pool. The guitar-hole flings its
garlands of ball-pointed bed springs about. An anatomical torso counters with cash.

Such perseverance and devotion, with face hints in the thicket, that steam up from twigs forming a
shawl-cloud – except where the bottom pool has formed a wheel over the torus (always a torus).

 

 

Ivars Balkits has retired as a writing tutor and  course facilitator at Ohio University whose prose and poetry have been published on various literary journal web sites. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014. 

 

 

Charles J. March III is a neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran currently living in California. His work has appeared in Evergreen Review, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Sensitive Skin Magazine, 3:AM, BlazeVOX, Expat Press, etc. More can be found at LinkedIn & SoundCloud.

Mr. Wexler Checks On His Garbage  

Mr. Wexler checks on his garbage,  
at the end of a long stone drive.  

Stands over it inspecting the bags for holes.  
Checking and rechecking to make sure
the ties are still taut
before standing with pygmy hands on hips, 
looking both ways down to the end of the street.  

Wondering if there is something wrong with his garbage.
They should have been by already.
He has not forgotten that one time they didn’t
take it.  

He stands and waits for the truck.
Watches over them now.  

Expecting them to refuse him.
Standing a few moments in surprise.  

Watching the truck lumber up the street  
with his rubbish.  

Before rushing back inside to start
all over again. 

 

Curses  

Swaddled and soused,  
the rambling mouth of riverbed curses  
pub crawling along with papa legba garden sluggery;  
Belief just a forger, your superstitions gathered like 
the horizon-absent clouds, chants and charms of 
bedazzled macaw where one would pry open the can
and look deep down for Reason –
what is left around the cauldron is a singular leprosy,
tears in stockinged feet that spill out over lonely mesh:
a spell, a speak, and where your broom to sweep?
Devoid of dark and arts and those who would readily listen,
my ears turned to corn stocks sold at market
by the bushel.  

 

 

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.

AGED

A hermit crab
has taken my skull
as its own,
scooping out my brain
to fall on the wet sand
of the beach
I used to
wander on
as a child
alive with dreams
and possibilities,
manifold paths stretching before me,

a beach I don’t recall
coming to today –
and yet here I am,
somehow – or any day
of my crowded adulthood,
the paths before me fewer,
their surfaces cracked
with weeds one might mistake
for flowers.

 

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales.  His play ‘Wall’ was part of Druid Theatre’s Druid Debuts 2020. His debut poetry collection “Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge” was published in 2010. He is currently working towards a second collection.

He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.

His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com