Five Card Stud

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Jonathan B. Aibel

I try to teach myself poker,
deal five hands all to myself.

My bluffs fail, my tells give
me away and I lose my pants

to the house, sent to the kitchen
to wash other peoples' food off dishes

for my debt, a hard bargain I struck,
disappointed with myself I guess

I should not have tried
to cheat, or not have done it so poorly
that I caught myself.

Author’s Statement: In this piece, I reflect on being a lonely child, playing games by myself, while my parents hosted fancy cocktail parties.

Jonathan B. Aibel is a recovering software engineer who lives in Concord, MA, traditional homelands of the Nipmuc.  His poems have been published, or will soon appear, in pacificREVIEW, Chautauqua, Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review,and elsewhere. http://www.jbaibelpoet.com.

Caw

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Erin Ratigan

They came to the garden
looking for the peanuts
I have tucked away
in a place where the squirrels
won’t see them,

and upon their arrival
my mother cheers
and quietly
sneaks out to join them
in their revelry

calling to them
in something as close
to their language
as witches can approximate.
She jokes that she is crazy

but how dull it would be
not to try to commune
with the corvids, their
feathers shining like her spirit
as she smiles to the sky.

Author’s Statement: In writing "Caw" I sought to share my observation of nature through a child's eyes –– namely, how I grew up watching my mother speak to the crows in our front garden. Seeing her commune with nature by attempting to speak their language (albeit through mimicry) I am reminded of old-world traditions and the association between crows and witches. The moments she shares with the crows, therefor, speak of the magic present in everyday life when we seek to share something special with others. Even if those others are not of our own species. 

Erin Ratigan is a freelance writer and journalist with a focus on long form and narrative news features. Her poetry has appeared in multiple publications including Door is a Jar Literary Magazine and POETiCA REViEW, and in the nature anthology Echoes of the Wild. She lives in North Texas.

Sycamores

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Thomas Strunk

The other day when I felt the weight
of the roof hanging low over me,
the ceiling sinking onto my shoulders,
I cut out of there and rushed
into the sunlight, into the forest
where walnuts and sycamores arched
their canopy high above me until
I wanted to stretch my arms until
I could touch the bark and grasp
the young leaves.
And I thought of you
then. How you floated away from me
and no matter how I fought to hold on,
you wormed free of every embrace,
slipped through my fingers, disappearing
over the days and decades until I
discovered you once more, a ghost,
first in my fingertips, and then through
the soles of my feet, pulling you
back down to earth.

Author’s Statement: "Sycamores" is a poem that came to me as I walked through the woods near my home in Cincinnati. I felt that day a connection between my emotions and the shape of the trees around me. In the poem, I am trying to describe the power nature has to revive our spirits and possibly heal us.

Thomas E. Strunk is the author of the poetry collection Transfigurations (Main Street Rag 2023). His literary work has appeared in The RavensPerch, Pensive, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and East Fork Journal among others. He is the author of History after Liberty and The Fall of the Roman Republic: Lessons for the American People. He lives in Cincinnati, where he teaches classical literature and history. Thomas is currently enrolled in the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University.

“midnight, dawn, dusk”

/

Tohm Bakelas

1.

Downtown, after midnight,
along Broadway, under
artificial light, past benches
the clocktower, and empty
parking lots, there are ghosts
that walk again. They are the
lost ones, the forgotten ones,
the ones without names. They
are the ones we locked out of
ourselves because we are alive.

2.

At dawn, in the cemetery, where
tombstones look like grey heads
protruding from beneath blankets
of powdered white snow, the sun,
blinded by its own radiance, was
naïve to autumn’s dying breath.
And winter’s bitter beauty cracked
its cold whip across the faces of
the living while the world was
frozen in glass-like frost.

3.

As if we could rewrite history,
as if we could turn back time,
we romanticize death by chasing
ghosts in the bottom of bottles.
These autumn days are numbered,
marked by crumbling daylight
that reflects in broken shards of
green glass beneath blue dusk.
We, who are forever cursed,
accept the night as our sun.

Author’s Note: Shortly before midnight I found myself on an inebriated journey, leaving my local watering hole, heading for my hometown. I decided to kick around my sanity while stumbling through the streets of my youth, past ghosts and memories I long forgot about until I eventually hit the cemetery. I thought about life and death and how it’s all one big fucking mess. After spending some time there, I checked the time and knew the sun would be arriving shortly, so I decided to go home. 

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including “Cleaning the Gutters of Hell” (Zeitgeist Press, 2023) and “The Ants Crawl in Circles” (Bone Machine, Inc., 2024). He runs Between Shadows Press. 

Got There: Warm and Cold Air

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Darren Demaree

Ribbons is a kinder, more playful
name for the tethers we’ve been
cutting loose. Look at how they dance
in front of those angry faces
that do not listen when we tell them
here, here is the cool water, warmed
by the air that travels, that does not
care about the names of places.
Naming is such a terribly calm violence.

Our skin cannot feel the larger map.
Run side by side into the tree-line.
Only the bombers can kiss angry
enough to chase us from there
& their governments have gone
broke turning us all into fractions.

Be with me as we burn the boats.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-one poetry collections, most recently “in defense of the goat as it continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff”, (forthcoming from April Gloaming, February 2024).  He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

August, Time Stops in the Deep South

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Paul Freidinger

I desert the future, forest the past
with clouded memory, conquest the air,

I am getting used to mouthing heat index,
amulet of despair. My wife keeps saying

it sneaks up on you, dangerous the woods
with ticks, bugs, snakes, poison ivy. I tug

the black river, dense from tannic acid,
time stops here, torpor of illusion. August

stirs muggy into every morning as the sun
hangs like a dead man on the end of a rope,

ghosts taunt me with their stories curdling
through an infinite afternoon, cicada buzz

electric when I gaze through deep shade.
I sleep the hour, everything closes down,

ennui is my neighbor knocking the door,
muffled with deterrence. Do I answer,

do I answer? You are welcome, no one else,
no one else. In the lull, I contest the quest

to keep on living.

 

Author’s Bio: I grew up in farm country in central Illinois and have always been drawn to rural settings. I also have a long history in Edisto Island, SC, and sense some similarity to its own rural ecology. Still, it is different from the Midwest. The weight of history is heavy in the deep South. A friend of mine told me years ago that the best description for summer here was the word muggy. People slow down in the summer, they temper ambition, and limit too much talk. Around the island are sand roads, live oaks, palmettos, marshland, and tidal creeks, with plenty of open space. Sometimes those settings seem primordial as if nothing has touched them for a thousand years. I often stop while driving around, get out of the car, and observe the scene. The views are peace, beautiful, and bucolic. They are also stultifying, all the more so when considering how Edisto was settled by Europeans. At one time there were twenty-nine plantations here, ranging from five thousand to ten thousand acres. In those moments I feel the struggles people faced here and the challenges of the climate, how it shaped attitudes and behavior. As climate change becomes more of a factor on our lives here, it is impossible for me not to consider that the heat, the sea, and the land will have the final word.

Paul Freidinger is a poet residing in Edisto Beach, SC, where the ocean continues to rise. It keeps him awake at night. Thankfully, writing sustains him. Paul was raised in Illinois farm country, taught school in suburban Chicago, and now lives in South Carolina’s low country where he also has a long history. He has poems recently published or forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Florida Review, Grist, Harpur Palate, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Isthmus, Pacific Review, Portland Review, Reunion: The Brasilia Review, The Dallas Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and William & Mary Review, among others.

Two Poems by Matthew Murrey

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Cassini’s End

What a finale, to go down in flames
all the while streaming
fresh details right to the end.
Twenty years was good enough.
They gave it one last loop
then sent it—foiled in gold—to burn.
Flare or stumble, may my last efforts
be so focused on my beloved
Earth, until I tumble and lose touch.
Brief pendant on a tether of smoke,
picture it blazing unseen high above Saturn’s
ferocious storms. Then radio silence forever.

Van Gogh’s Two Chairs

In the simple one his pipe and pouch
of tobacco. In his friend’s fine chair
two books and a lit candle. Oh,
to live and love like a small
flame. A book or smoke
can bring reverie
or bind you
to habits hard
to break. What breaks—
promises, the heart, the hold
on what’s real? Through cracks
in what seems whole, I find myself
seeking out a bit of joy—vivid colors
and swirls that some will always insist
are nothing but sky, lamplight, and stars.

Author’s Note: The seed of the Cassini poem was an animated video produced by NASA which showed the satellite burning up on its entry into Saturn's atmosphere. The image of it immediately brought to mind a bright pendant on a necklace. The online presentation can be found here: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/the-journey/the-grand-finale/. The Van Gogh poem took off for me when I learned that Vincent's painting of Gauguin's chair was kept from view for decades by Johanna Bonger who inherited the pair of paintings as the widow of  Vincent's brother Theo, but refused to loan out the one painting due to her dislike of Gauguin. People can read about that back story and see the paintings here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/18/revealed-van-gogh-empty-chair-paintings-gauguin 

Matthew Murrey’s poems have appeared widely, most recently in Poetry East, Jet Fuel Review, and Split Rock Review. He’s an NEA Fellowship recipient, and his collection, Bulletproof, was published in 2019 by Jacar Press. He was a public school librarian for over twenty years and lives in Urbana, Illinois. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/ and he is on Twitter and Instagram @mytwords. 

Lament of the Afflicted

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Deborah-Zenha Adams

In that year of subtle omens, all the irises
bloomed yellow, harbingers of passion and betrayal,
and we cut bouquets to fill a broken vase.

Next there came a wailing wind
even though the burdened air was stalled
and bamboo chimes hung stagnant.

Words you never spoke brushed like premonition
against my neck, a witching chill
that froze our tongues and sliced the truth.

Lightning flashed and thunder knocked
three times, an incantation calling out the demons
that cackle when we tiptoe past closed doors.

I’ve heard footsteps in the attic,
found a trail of black feathers on the stairs,
and tasted cold metal in my cheek.

Shades appear at the treeline between dark and day
crooking their fingers, beckoning, taunting.
Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine going there.

Did we break the seal of some pharaoh’s tomb,
defile a sacred cloth, cross a black cat’s path?
Isn’t there a counter spell to correct our sins?

What would I offer in trade to erase
the trail we’ve left? Can we unspin the wheel
and chance we’ll get it right the second time?

Never mind. I know better. There’s no stopping
the forward motion of a curse once
it learns the taste of your name.

 

Deborah-Zenha Adams is a seventh-generation Tennesseean. Her written work has appeared or will soon appear in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Sheila-na-gig, One, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Waterwheel Review, among other places.