Knowing that the plunge
Will come, the certainty of it
Plucks me bare
Aloft, still wet here in December air.
Each wind-soughed stir
Of this wooden frame
Creaks that the waters will have me again
Only a question now of when
And for how long they’ll keep me under.

NICK BLACK’s writing has been published in literary magazines including Train Lit Mag, Entropy, Jellyfish Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, (b)OINK zine, the Lonely Crowd, Spelk Fiction, Open Pen and Funhouse.

Image: Tobias Dahlberg via Pixabay

Like a used book in the library free bin,
you’ve become an overlooked thing
that no one wants to check out anymore.

But I’m one of the few people left
who can read you differently;

remember the minor scandals caused
when you walked past the snack stand
at Washington Park

in a wet t-shirt pressed
over a light-blue bikini.

Your mania gave birth to a body
which spoke with warped energy
and chromatic fragrance

in a voice misunderstood
by all but my most ancient self.

Yet still, your touch thuds with the essence
of unrealized destiny,

a technique taking us to
the place where undertakers
choose to congregate
in a muddy huddle

deciding whether what remains of us
needs to be frozen or embalmed.

Neither of us ever thought
we’d see the death of print
or the desirability in each other;

couldn’t have imagined
that the sun would stop slavering
so soon.

RICHARD KING PERKINS II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

Image: Myriams-Fotos

Put on these pants, run your hands
down your thighs. Like the scales?
Wearing dinosaur pants honors

the common pool of DNA
from which all poetics derive.
You wonder what dinosaurs left

inscribed or impressed in mud
besides their notorious pawprints.
Sometimes prowling riverbeds

in search of polished garden stones
I find in the sandstone ledge
runic scrawls a reptile claw

might have penned in a moment
of reflection on the forthcoming
and predictable mass extinction.

Although I can’t read these marks
by touching them I feel a throb
in my brain that corresponds

to the ache for mutual expression
that binds us to trees and mice.
You know that feeling: a whisk

of fibers across tingling nerves,
a pleasure rooted too deeply
to betray its source. Wearing

dinosaur pants in public
proclaims your allegiance to facts
that foil the religious fools

who rely too much on one brave book
to shield them from the distance
that pours like milk through us all.

You look good in that tight fabric,
the green-gray scales flattering
your gunpowder complexion,

and your confident stride folding
and unfolding dinosaur-thoughts
that never go out of fashion.

WILLIAM DORESKI’s work has appeared in various e and print journals and in several collections, most recently A Black River, A Dark Fall (Splash of Red, 2018). 

Image: InspiredImages

It appeared on Charles Bridge
A canvas of wood, moonlit,
Wedging between the statues.
Those daring of us, we went near
And found these words within.

What does it do with the words it collects?
How affected is meaning
When leaning between
Voices from another register
And land?
What editorializing is this,
What unelected censorship?
Does it have a plan
This wooden confessor,
This multi-drawered dresser
Of strange design?
Where do I write to,
Who do I ask?
Do I dare include these here,
My niggling doubts,
My fears?
How easy it would be
To pull open an empty drawer,
Easing anxiety
Just by the asking?
It’s silent This Cabinet Of Heed
But It has some need.
I know It has a need.

I walk home.
I don’t know Its meaning
Or Its promise.
Dad thinks It’s learning from us.

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Image: Free-Photos via Pixabay

a chorus
of sunsets
sang to me of you,
as i thought perhaps this was the
last time your name
would swim
through my veins;
it was not—
you were the only woman
i ever loved,
and the one to wake in me the dreaming
when i thought it was dead;
i drove you away
because of my fear and my confusion
my anger was not for you but my inability to process
these feelings—
all my life i had been taught this was wrong
didn’t want to be wrong i only wanted to be right
i knew everyone already saw me as
a burden and a blight
on the family tree
just wanted to manage something right,
but perhaps it was my heart that was right and theirs wrong;
regardless i hurt you and for that i am sorry—
i remember how you always smelled
of roses
a pink sunset made me weep for missing you
because as tired as everyone is of hearing your name
it is your name that speaks to me loudest still
even if you never could or will feel the same once i love
i love forever
because that’s what love is
appreciation not ownership.

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Image: Tomas Jasovsky on Unsplash

She was the one who broke up the relationship,
and over a plate of his favorite
blueberry pancakes, overdosed with maple syrup.
Now she has her eye on someone at the office.
So what if he doesn’t notice her.
It’s better to have loved and lost
than kiss a man who tastes of trees.

Her apartment reminds her too much of her ex
so she’s thinking of moving,
down south if that part of the country will have her.
She longs for more sky than New England can provide,
and oranges like miniature suns.
So what if Florida’s tacky.
And, instead of her comfortable furniture,
she’s stuck with cheap rattan.
And the walls in every room are pink,
the color that makes her want to puke.
So what if the so-what’s keep adding up.

She buys a bikini
even though the local summers are hobbit-short.
It fits her well enough
and make her feel younger
She wears it around her rooms
as a protection against loneliness.

She seldom visits the local beaches
but swears to herself
that if he ever moved to where
the beach was hot and broad and sanded gold,
she’d never leave.
She might even go into the water up to her waist.
Her favorite move as a child was “The Little Mermaid.”
She would be Ariel, heart halfway between sea and shore.

Now she wonders if she should have ended the relationship.
He was good for her despite his uninhibited sweet tooth.
And though not as dreamy as that guy in the office
he was kind and considerate and reliable.
Nothing Ariel would have left her briny home for.
But comforting, like “It’s A Wonderful Life”, her other favorite film.

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Studio One and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East and Midwest Quarterly.

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Image: Photo by Calum Lewis on Unsplash

Lake. Lake. Emptying
The lake. A boundless
Emptying of spirit into
Something else. How
Smiles fade. What
Quickness is. Unkempt
Reciprocity of the rain-
Bow. Taking up stand-
Up in the service of
Radical immanence.
To descend toward
Infamy in such small
Steps—noiseless,
In fresh snow…….

TOM SNARSKY teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA.

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Image: skeeze

It rained for days and we were all
under a carpet cloud of grey that stretched
through mornings into nights
filled with kamikaze drops
that pelted themselves from their sky palette
turning the land into a living wet watercolour.

Fields became lakes, rivers spilled
over, sand-bag dams were built
to try to keep the waters out
but a dog drowned in its owner’s home.
Houses had to be abandoned.

Someone spoke about building a boat.
A tractor convoy was a funeral cortège
through floodwaters
with a trailer hearse carrying mourners
seated on square hay bales
around the coffin
and still the rain kept falling

Until it stopped and there was silence
and almost the whole land was a silvery mirror
and light dripped from trees.

COLETTE COLFER lectures part-time in world religions at Waterford Institute of Technology. She is a PPI-Award winning radio producer and has worked in print and broadcast journalism. She’s had poems published in Skylight 47, Three Drops From a Cauldron, Poetry Ireland Review, Algebra of Owls and The Poets’ Republic.

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Image: Pixabay

Up here the seasons reign:
Winter is the queen, an ermine-clad enchantress,
Milk-skinned and bitten-lipped.

She licks at warm breath hungrily,
Seeking to devour, conspiring with Wind
To sever fingertips.

Her serried ranks of sentries stiffen.
Bare brittle limbs that clamour, seeking succour
From her sick embrace

Are scorned. She scowls on them
And black eyes that cannot reflect a light are scorched
Into that sinewed face.

Quick-witted, fleet-footed
She flits and dances, bestowing on her subjects
A frigid taste of daggers.

Trickling tongues are made rigid,
Silenced by her stare. The mirror-glass she shatters,
Quick to splinter. Jagged

Glass fragments are her knives,
Staggered sharpened shards of scratching crystal ice.
She’ll rub them in your eyes.

But the queen can be usurped.
She’ll wither, pucker, desiccate, decay.
And soon she’ll die.

A tender green emerges
And you taste the frost that’s held in meagre light.
White against white.

Snowdrop, do not bow your head.
You herald a new majesty.

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Image: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The wheezing generators
Smother Mother Nature’s own gasps,
The crickets and the cane frogs,
But tonight’s moonlight needs a boost
Out here far from the Stuart Highway.
We need the lamps to witness
This multi-drawered wonder,
To have light to read by,
These stories and poems,
Each in a numbered drawer,
Forevermore,
While our shoes stain red
From the iron in the soil
Before The Cabinet teleports again.
These stories and poems
Exhaling light
For those who dare
This far from the road.

In a twinkling of an eye, severe lacerations
furrowed the magnificence of ornament of her ebony
to silence growth, quicken mortification,
write an elegy,
…exalt once born in a furtive agony.

Out of demolition, the ardent glove
arose and seized the skull of creature innocent,
underneath,
to stigmatize its skin with a diabolical mark,
smother the will to struggle
in a vehement resistance until it gave in.

On a topmost step where continuance
derives from nothingness,
hardened to doubt, dissuaded from timidity of sin
…sparkles in the sand, a flickering laughter,
I shall be waiting to …again, become embodied.
Will you …
Will you wait for me?

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Image: Foundry Co

Disused Cadillacs in the dust bowl,
doors open, mileage done,
twin halogen headlights outshone
by two hundred thousand miles
of nowhere and a billion stars,
all dying for another song on the radio,
young arms outstretched on the bench seat,
people always leaving, dreading arriving,
the open road was home,
the open road drummed hope
under white wall tyres,
vast continents lay behind,
and tomorrow was always
another day’s drive away.

PEADAR O’DONOGHUE is an anti-poet, photographer, and co-editor of PB mag.

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Image: Photo by Kevin Clark on Unsplash

In the dead heat of a Berlin summer
I am drilling holes into sharp sheets of tin.

The thin tin wobbles
through hands clumsy in gloves
and I lean heavily,
hunched over,
finger on trigger,
pushing into the space between my knees.

He stands behind me
leaning on the door
in a grey t-shirt,
the one he wears for messy work,
bald head reflecting the sun,
eyes on my back,
watching.

He watches with folded arms as sweat gathers under my arms and between my breasts,
as it runs down my temple and plops with purpose onto the tin.
He watches as the drill gets stuck and bits of frayed metal spin into the dirt.
He watches as I lose my balance and waver, hand flailing, sudden jump in my throat.

He watches until the job is done.

And then he walks away.

MIA CHRISTINA DÖRING is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction and poetry has been published in Vias Poetry Journal, Litro Magazine and Headstuff. Her novel Falling was long listed for the Mercier book deal competition in February 2017. Her non-fiction has been published in Headstuff, The Journal and The Huffington Post.

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Image: Michael Schwarzenberge

And even in the red fruits of forgetting
There is the pulse of knowing
What to retain, what to maintain
As the certain color. The silence
Of solitude is a red that brings itself
The liquids, the ways violets insinuate
Their flows into recall. If I have to wear
Red, then let it be the translucencies,
The ways you say no to my offers
Of galaxies, my extensions of the yeses
Vis-à-vis the constellations bridging
Our disagreements. The light years
Should connect me to your flowerings,
And if I regurgitate my heart whole
It is because love tenders
The notions of forgiving.

JONEL ABELLANOSA resides in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dwarf Stars and the Best of the Net Awards. His fourth collection is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House.

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Image: JB Pe

Time’s old conveyor belt chugs
your carcass-laden soul

into a ripening future—too soon
to harvest, too late to uproot.

Under a cold and stinking sun,
bed sheets flap on a line,

like doorways to hidden rooms.
And look—there’s your mom:

clothespins in her pursed lips,
a laundry basket at her hip,

her feet planted in the grass,
among the rotten pears.

G.F. BOYER has published poems in a number of journals, including The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Heron Tree. She lives with her wife and their cat in rural Pennsylvania, where she edits and manages the Clementine Unbound poetry website and works as a freelance editor. Her full-length book, Missile :: Hymnal :: Amulet, will be released in January 2019 by FutureCycle Press.

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Image: Maaark

Emily folded the poem neatly
and returned it to its home.
She pushed the twenty-fifth drawer
back into the body of The Cabinet.
There were thousands more pieces to be discovered
but she could hear her brother call her
from the beach.
She breathed in this wondrous find,
this curious silent friend,
and ran out from the cave.
Emily would return in the morning
to read some more,
perhaps she would bring her brother with her.
But as her feet made their tracks
in the soft sand of Castle Beach,
The Cabinet Of Heed was already teleporting
elsewhere.

Image: Sanwal Deen

He was the best ever Christmas gift,
slid in and under the wiry tree
whose needles fell like starched thread.
Baubles bobbed on branches, the softest
oyster pink and baby blue. Bottle green
and ketchup red, though sparsely hung
they did their best.

He was rigid, a matte emerald
with a sliver of silver
coiled at the tip, his feet encased
in a hub. I lifted him out in awe.
Questions in coloured orbs
made a perfect circle
a surround for a scooped out hollow.

On the other side a little mirrored pond
for Magic Robot to stand. I placed him
at his station, with his outstretched hand
and put him to work, on his little
mirror, all Christmas without a break
until he protested and disappeared,
among all the debris of our childhood.

Bio: Lorraine Carey is an Irish poet and artist from Donegal, now living in Kerry. Her poems have featured in the following ; Ariel Chart, The Blue Nib, Atrium, The Honest Ulsterman, Vine Leaves, The Galway Review, Quail Bell, Proletarian, Olentangy Review, A New Ulster, Stanzas, ROPES, North West Words, Picaroon and Sixteen and is forthcoming in Laldy, Launchpad and The Runt Zine. Her artwork has featured in Three Drops From A Cauldron, Dodging the Rain and Riggwelter Press. Lorraine’s debut collection – From Doll House Windows, is published by Revival Press.

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You fly low to the river.
I see you, wanting to go further, the water like loose sugar.

I know the frisson in your wings, the way the water makes you think.

Your body ignites;
my hand unexpectedly close to ruin, fewer hairs
on the tops of my fingers.
The breeze bites down on
necks of the reeds thrown back.
— just as quickly dissolves.

Her shirt pouted,
shifting to redress some balance, when she said
she felt uncomfortable. So much static
in the hand rail, as though we were already touching.
She tried to steer my eyes aground.
Her nails jewelled, like you.
Beautiful Demoiselle, Common Blue Damsel.

Only a thumbprint on the air
before she flickered,
her friend cutting in.

Bio: Eilise Norris currently writes short stories, flash fiction and poetry alongside working full-time in academic publishing. She has recently contributed flash fiction to EllipsisZine and BlinkInk. This is her first published poem. Twitter: @eilisecnorris

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Image: Stux

That match in your hand
look again
carefully
without prejudice:
it’s a bird,
and it’s looking sidewise at you.
Tweet tweet.
How noise if not a bird?
It wants to light up your world for you
and stroke its wings with its beak
and sing a song.
I always was a bird lover.
Can’t you be one too?

Bio: Breslin White is a poet with Irish and Japanese family. He has submitted to Nashville Review, Cardinal Sins, concis, and more, and waiting to hear back. He has published a book of flower poetry called Lily Thrust.

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Image: Robert C