Poetry

Cadence

By Barbara Baydala
I’m writing to let you know the microwave is working again. Not because  / anybody fixed it. No one here is that clever. It just started working again. We  / never stopped...

A Change

By Michael Meagher
At first it’s your hands, blistered, / mat studs making soft flesh / raw, your back, pulling, heaving, / splintered, like working against / a wall, and your shoulders, tight, / burning,...

If It Tumbles Down

By Jan Conn
Battling here-or-there-fatigue / in brilliant yellow darkness. / The tiniest sounds of fracture — / all eighths disappear from the Inch River. /   / Tomorrow the lights go out, the bone /...

Prayer for a New Song

By Michael V. Smith
Here in this narrow seat  / with a god’s eye view  / from the belly of unfathomable / mechanics, 36 077 feet / from the Earth, I want only to grace /...

We See Here, He Said,

By Hari Malagayo Alluri
only one soldier on the porch, and only for a moment.  / Army is a visiting ferris wheel, he whispered. A carousel.  /   / The carousel’s accordion-clefted orbit arrives regardless of...

Bad Help

By Maurice Mierau
On Marley’s wall in ’64 hung Melba Ogle,  / center-fold. Bad help is a turn-off she said. /   / Bob said ’scuse me to the girl in his bed, / There’s...

Some Brother Me

By Michael Patrick Jessome
Kicking at the dirt of the dirt sidewalk; / Pulling my sister along by the hand.  /   / Old Johnny Devoe has dumped his bucket / Across the road. “Don’t look...

Silver birch gone gold

By Elise Marcella Godfrey
and ravens everywhere. /   / Each glimpse of wing a cue — / there is work to complete: /   / pacts to bind and wind / to read. Ciphered tongues /...

De-Listed

By Ben Murray
housecat on couch is not  / being poached, aphrodisiac-ed / to extinction, is not lapping  / last water from last pools,  / reflections /   / dog barking neighborhood is not /...