The Moments

Doug Bolling

It would be evening soon and
We walked among yellowing willows
As shadows motioned from their
Deft hiding places among the
Wind blown sand dunes.
What are our words you said into
The hollows of spaces surrounding us.
What is their reach as they slip from
Tongues into the blue dark ever
Lastingness of an hour or a century.
We came as beginners still making
A world from the quiltings of youth,
The regimen invented by parents
As they aged into statuary we would
Never be able to buy.
Somewhere ahead a future in its
Bounty, roads waiting for us if we
Dare the unknowns, can put past
And present and future together,
Face moments when no answers
Come.

We stood on the shore listening
To the outgoing tide, the silences
Trailing behind.

0ut of the sea the flight of gulls
Suddenly overhead, their eyes
Fastened to ours, their brazen
Screechings shaping the dusk.

*This poem first appeared in a slightly different version under the title “Passage” in the print edition of The Rockford Review.

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Author’s note:

How this poem developed I can’t easily explain. Long years of closeness to nature beginning in childhood and continuing. Walking deep into woods and knowing sudden fear of lostness along with an intense joy. And the sea. My first view of it was in Virginia Beach on a snowy cold weekend. I got a ride from William and Mary and hitchhiked back on a wintry Sunday evening. The poem is a mix of numerous revisions and intimations beyond those. But these are only words. Better go. I hear Mother Gaea calling.

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Doug Bolling’s poetry has appeared in Posit, Slant, The Inflectionist Review, About Place Journal, Kestrel, Connecticut River Review and Birmingham Arts Journal, among others. He has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and several awards and is a native of Kentucky now living next door to Chicago. He is a graduate of William and Mary and has graduate degrees from Iowa.

love

alyssa archambault

when you are sick

i will be there

to give you soup

and tissues

and medicine

and anything else you need.

i will willingly clean

your extremely dirty living room

and i’ll wash the sheets

that you couldn't be bothered

to throw in the washer.

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Author’s note: This poem, “love,” was written during a period just after a breakup. I write to process emotions, and I was processing loss, frustration, and longing while writing this poem. The poem is written from the perspective of a prospective lover who cares deeply for the person to whom they are speaking.

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alyssa archambault is an 18 year old student who has been writing for four years as a way to recover from mental health struggles including anxiety and depression. Her goal is to help at least one person through her writing and show them that they are not alone and things will get better. She has had poetry published in Upon Arrival: Transitions, Wild Tongue: A Journal of Feminist Art, and WinglessDreamer’s Wicked Young Writer’s Poetry Collection. She is currently working on a full length poetry manuscript titled she will rise: a journey of recovery and self discovery.

Promise

Taunja Thomson

Evening spills on the carpet
slow spreading
like ink

I think of cereal & molecule
season & cup   cow & fracture
pears spilling from the tree
during our neighbors’ harvest
the curtain that I open to watch
twilight fired over limbs
& laughter 

The next morning I carry the day
in my skirt like so many 
ducklings bubbling & peeping
& fuzzy with promise

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Author’s Note: I went to bed in a bad mood one evening. Then I ended up having a dream about how as a child I used to watch our neighbors harvest the pears from their tree every summer—always lots of people, lots of laughter, so much fun to watch from my bedroom window as the twilight wore on. The first thing I did when I woke up the next morning, in a much better mood, was write this poem about how some memories can change our attitudes for the better & how important it is to hang onto them.

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Three of t.m. thomson’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She is co-author of Frame and Mount the Sky (2017) and author of Strum and Lull (2019), which placed in Golden Walkman’s 2017 chapbook competition, and The Profusion (2019). Her passions include kickboxing, playing in mud, and savoring art. You can find her writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter/.

Dinette Set

Kenneth Pobo

My husband Dulcet and I go shopping
for a dinette set. I want to win one on
Let’s Make A Deal. I can make a crazy outfit,
but Dulcet doesn’t do crazy outfits. He doesn’t
like outfits at all, says life is a pressed pair
of pants, shirt tucked in. It works for him.

Sometimes I pull the shirt out of his pants
and cluck like a hen. He gets irritated
until I put on a rerun of The Nanny.

We’ve been married for fifteen years.
Maybe in our eighties we still won’t have
a new dinette set. The sun will butter us
even if we’ve gone stale, the finish line
getting clearer as we turn up the sound—

that Nanny Fine, we laugh at the same jokes,
repeat them. Then the show’s over.

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Author’s note: I like to write character poems and Dulcet Tones is who I am working on now. The title, “Dinette Set,” came about by listening to a group from the early 80s called The Dynette Set.

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Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose is forthcoming from Brick/House Books.

A Plate of Rainwater

Dan Cuddy

When there’s nothing
A plate of rainwater is something

You could go for days
A dog with a tongue like a tail
Wagging, lapping up
The condensing steam off somebody else’s coffee

Your eyes could get that far away look
A car with luggage piled in the back seat

One white shirt, a tie
Red like a tongue
On a wire hanger
Hung on a hook

You hope you sell
Your life
To the first corporation
Available

What have you done?
Lately?

You have lived by your wits
Bushy eyebrows, eyelashes carwash brushes
Attitude a trash-compacter
Sincerity grinded out somehow

You are given a plate of rainwater
Told to sit
Water comes from the sky
Trickles down

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Author’s note: What inspired it? I was thinking about the economy and trickle down ecobomics. What trickles down? Rainwater is the only thing that truly trickles down. Starting out and maybe finishing up in the American economy is a game of hustle. You don't have anything but your wits and perseverance to get yourself through. I worked 30 years for the late Maryland State Job Service. I've met a lot of people looking for a job.

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Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. Most recently he has had poems published in the End of 83, Broadkill Review, Welter, the Twisted Vine Literary Journal, the Pangolin Review, Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rats’s Ass Review and forthcoming in Gargoyle.

Examination Questions, with Contradiction

Devon Miller-Duggan

Why only red birds of commerce flying across the black ground?

Profit or Prophet: Whose feet burn with each step?

Where are the million mouths of want, or war? Will sons return?

To whom do you give your hands that your children might live?

Is weather still to arrive, or do storms only tempest inside the skulls of the living?

Who hears the sirens more closely—those waiting or those who pierce their own eardrums?

Which stones speak truth?

Which mouths swallow trees?

Where do wings fall so that we may gather them?

When can I see my own face without fear?

What are these talons of air surrounding me? What am I to know?

What is the fabric of sacrifice? The garment of watchfulness?

Why this sky? This season? These pages and days without answers?

Oh, pronounce our road, our cleansing, our ruins.

Let the black birds against a red sky be the warning.

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Author’s note: I was thinking on the anniversary of my god-son's death in Helmand province about the persistence of war and the way we never learn to ask the right questions or see the warnings properly.

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Devon Miller-Duggan has published poems in Margie, The Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, and Spillway.She teaches at the University of Delaware. Her books include Pinning the Bird to the Wall(Tres Chicas Books, 2008), Alphabet Year, (Wipf & Stock, 2017), The Slow Salute, Lithic Press Chapbook Competition Winner, 2018). 

Evening Window in May

Lucie McKee

As my hand

rests on the

apple branch

my hair

blossoms.

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Author’s note: I write at a table near windows overlooking a crabapple tree. In the evening
when the light is right, sometimes I see my face superimposed on the tree in the window glass, and I find this quite eerie in a delightful way.

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Lucie McKee lives in Bennington, Vermont. She has an MFA in poetry from Bennington College. She has published poems in both the UK and the USA - The Southern Review (USA) and Poetry Review (UK). and many other publications.