At the Lake House
Danny P. Barbare
With a clean sheet of paper
and a pen filled with ink
I remember along a road by
blackberries, golden rod
and queen anne’s lace
I walk to the lake where the
sun tosses or rather wind
and admire the great wide
open filled with peace
I head home by the shrill of
cicadas close my journal
and eat catfish for supper.
Tomorrow I will pick the
blackberries plump and juicy
as I can’t wait for pie.
Danny P. Barbare resides in South Carolina. His poems have recently appeared in Fine Lines and Crux. He says he loves to travel to The Blue Ridge and Charleston, SC. He lives with his family and wife and small dog Miley in the Upstate of the Carolinas.
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A Little Sugar
Darrell Petska
James Wilbur‘s situation at Mt. Carmel had become untenable, so the day after his 87th birthday, he decided to die. His family had visited, wishing him another year. But he was ready now. It couldn’t be hard. He’d become a shell of himself. His heart beat so weakly he could scarcely feel it. Death would come, a gentle release. To accomplish this, he merely sat propped by pillows in his bed, closed his eyes, and let his awareness merge with everything around him. People spoke. Dishes clattered. Crows raised a ruckus. Peace descended upon him.
A kaleidoscope of faces and events flashed before his inner eye. His joys and sorrows bore the same soft glow.No regrets, no unfinished tasks remained.
James Wilbur felt himself passing from flesh into universal vastness. The nursing home, neighborhood, city and state—like concentric circles his being ranged free. Euphoria suffused him, mitigated slightly by the recognition that he had emptied his bladder. But nothing could stop him now. He was approaching his event horizon—neither precipice nor ascension, just the absolute purity of being, untrammeled by the crudeness of history.
His blood all but ceased to flow, eternity’s warm finger poised before the switch of consciousness. James Wilbur ceded himself to the infinite.
"Mr. Wilbur? Naptime’s over! Let’s clean you up so you can join the others in the day room. Nice flowers! A little sugar in the vase makes them last.”
Darrell Petska’s fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Frontier, Bird's Thumb, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. With 30 years on the academic staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 40 years as a father (seven years a grandfather), and a half century as a husband, Darrell lives outside Madison, Wisconsin.
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Too Much Information
Richard Nester
Most molars—yours included—have four roots,
but each of mine are doubled, which in X-rays
makes them look quite elegant, like sun-twisted
pea vines or twin tuxedoed dancers, twined
around themselves in the jaw’s ballroom.
Having double roots means my teeth
are screwed in very tight—like Fred and Ginger,
ivory bears in winter or birch-tree bark—
which no one knew until I needed a root canal.
The orthodontist was amazed, having seen hundreds
of roots but none like mine. This trait must come
from somewhere, certainly, packed like luggage
over mountains, seas, neither useful enough
to be adopted en masse nor so dangerous as to be
weeded out, a part of universal randomness,
vagabonds from steerage with their thin coats
and raging bellies in sight of land—
my roots, my hitchhiking strangers. My feet too
are strange, almost grotesque, but more nearly
functional, not art.
Richard Nester is the author of 4 books of poems, the most recent Red Truck Bear (Kelsay, 2020). His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Cape Discovery: the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Anthology, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review and on-line in Qarrtsiluni and Inlandia.
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Work Glove
Robbi Nester
My father worked for fifty years, got up
at two and three to drive a milk truck,
deliver pies, or labor over circuit boards
for NASA or the Navy. After he retired,
I seldom saw him without a screwdriver
or pliers, fixing an old T.V., rewiring
the house, or in the garden, planting.
After a stroke, my father couldn’t work.
I sold his house in Philadelphia, emptying it
first of his oscilloscopes and pliers,
screws and nuts, tubes and transistors.
He had been too ill to supervise the move
to a board and care far away. Before I left,
I spotted his old work glove on the stairs,
fat brown fingers like the crusty loaves
stacked at the bakery, still warm, as if
he’d just been wearing it. I thought about
his hands, always making something,
fixing, planting. Lying in the hospital,
my father told me he had to have
some tools, or else he couldn’t be a man.
His tools sat in a corner of the room
he shared with mom. He would take them
out and hold them, so his hands
remembered how it felt to work.
Even now, it’s his hands I think of first.
Robbi Nester is the author of 4 books, the most recent Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019). Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared widely, most recently in Pirene's Fountain Culinary Poems, North of Oxford, Ekphrastic Review, McQueen's Quinterly, Tiferet, Rhino, and forthcoming in the anthology Aeolian Harp 6.
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Covid-19 – Mid March 2020
Michael Allyn Wells
Suffering comes in many sizes.
Broken down feet.
A curved back.
Standing on an escalator
rising in age
there is a jolt
and the steps collapse
one into another
on the race to old.
Sheltering in place
except for provisions,
medicine,
work where I am mostly Isolated.
My children call their mom.
Where is dad?
Each has anxiety for different reason.
Michael Allyn Wells is an alumnus of the AWP Writer to Writer program -Spring 2017 session. He showed an interest in poetry during high school but did not engage as a serious writer until much later in life. He makes his home in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife and their 3 rescue dogs. His work has appeared in numerous print and online venues including, Remington Review, Best of Boston Literary Magazine Volumes I & II, Punchnel’s Magazine, Nude Bruce Review, Rockhurst Annual Fine Arts Review, Montucky Review and Apeiron Review.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
After Taking My Sister to the ER
Cara Armstrong
Melting medications swirl prior to each flush. Amazed by accumulation, variety, classifications; antibiotics and painkillers, opioids and antidepressants, anti-seizures to anti-everythings I can’t even identify as I empty out white garbage bags full of hoarded pills. I focus on color—the rainbow, rainbow, rainbow of uncaught fish in Key West’s harbor. I empty, flush, pause, bat the cat’s paw away, humming it all in. The flush repeat. The flush repeat. The flush repeat of color. Let me praise the reds, true standouts amidst beiges and blues, like cinnamon red hots burning through our lives and leaving trails on the tongue, the stain and knockout punch.
Cara Armstrong is the Director of the School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University. She is the author and illustrator of 2 children’s books, Moxie: The Dachshund of Fallingwater and the tri-lingual Counting with Cats who Dream/Compte avec les Chats qui Revent/Contando con Gatos que Suenan as well as co-author of Frank Lloyd Wright in Panorama and A Guide to Cleveland’s Sacred Landmarks.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Terrier
Gregory John Pagano
Grey skies and blue masks
Plague in the year of the rat
Where has the dog gone?
Gregory John Pagano is an American living in Northeast China who loves writing poetry in his spare time.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Licks of Ice Cream
Ed Ahern
My dead parents swirl like
multi-flavored ice cream cones
with essences nested but unblended.
Younger and older, angry and caring,
bitter and benign, hopeful and sad.
My father has faint flavors.
He died when I was ten
and the tastes I imagine-
dark chocolate and rum raisin,
are thin and runny.
My mother starts her cone
with strawberry and vanilla,
but widowhood and privation
add tabasco and nutshells
for my tongue to encounter.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over two hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
She’s Twelve Years Old
Laura Rodley
If your dog has cancer
you cannot tell her so,
you cannot explain
two lumps in her liver
equal disaster; she lies
by your feet and sighs,
content. That you have
to wait for when she has
symptoms or pain to
give her medication
beyond the liver support
supplements, she has no
clue. She’s here now
until she’s not here now.
The vet told me he had cried
after her ultrasound,
before he told me,
that’s how I knew
it wasn’t good.
Three to six months,
there’s no way to know.
Options are limited.
But what am I to tell Tyndall?
Good dog, here’s a treat,
let’s go for a walk, stop
bugging the cat. Just the
usual. Nothing special.
Her fur is the color of our
oak flooring that we lay
down with mallet and nails.
She has one spot on the ridge
along her spine that resembles
a backwards paw.
She’s been walking forward
and backwards at the same time
her whole life.
Miraculous.
Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Kleptoparasitic
Timothy Gager
Going to heaven, tears
held back, snared,
in hell,
like a fly in a strip, stuck,
a glue tape restrictive
morphine-like soaring
into the Pro-zap or skipping Prozac,
the limbo of an insect’s life is
a human antonym, perhaps a hymn
of yang and yin, stuck within
majesty of dewdrops,
web affixed, holding
a place. On Earth,
unlike the Theridiidae, we beg
to hold the dying.
Timothy Gager is the author of fifteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest, Spreading Like Wild Flowers, is his eighth collection of poetry. He has had over 600 works of fiction and poetry published, of which sixteen have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has been read on National Public Radio, has also been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, and The Best Small Fictions Anthology.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Revenge of the Pangolin
Keith Tornheim
I’m sorry, he said.
I only wanted to get
those pangolin killers.
So I borrowed a coronavirus
from distant cousin bat
and transformed it within me
to something that could attack
humans and quickly leap
from one to the next,
to the next, to the next.
But I didn’t know your airplanes
could extend the leap
from continent to continent
so none of you were safe—
even those who watched and cheered
for pangolins on PBS.
Thereupon he curled back into a ball.
Keith Tornheim, a biochemistry professor at Boston University School of Medicine, has five recent books, I Am Lilith, Dancer on the Wind; Spirit Boat: Poems of Crossing Over; Can You Say Kaddish for the Living?; Fireflies: Poems of Love and Family; and Spoiled Fruit: Adam and Eve in Eden and Beyond. His poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, The Somerville Times, Boston Literary Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review and Poetica.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Apples and Chamomile
Louise Worthington
Alice firstly disorientates the trousers by smacking out the creases then hangs them upside down on the washing line.
Next, she makes hostage of his blue shirts by pinning them down by the shoulders, firmly wedging the peg over the cotton so there is permanent tension in the shoulders. The scent on the garments is all her own making, a fresh fragrance of apples and chamomile.
Alice sniffs the air. A storm is coming, just as she thought. The sky has never been bigger, wider, darker.
From the kitchen window, Alice watches the restless wind circling the fabric, trying and failing to escape, like a trapped bird flapping against a window, seeking sky and cloud when there is only glass and window.
Alice opens the kitchen window just as the storm comes, raining anarchy on the house and garden, on the cornered garments, tearing shirts and trousers free from the washing line. The rain comes relentless and remorseless as his lies. She has packed her suitcase. The washing basket is empty.
Not all of Alice’s husband’s clothes would fit on the washing line – the rest lie in a heap on the lawn.
He always was insistent on having two of everything.
Louise Worthington’s short fiction has recently appeared in Scribble, Fresher Press, Paragraph Planet and Northern Flash Fiction. She self-published her debut novel Distorted Days last year.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Slam all the doors
Nina Rubinstein Alonso
Automatic chatter sounds like me
replying “fine”
though act three fell hard
tossing routine phrases
for someone’s comfort
not mine
doubtful list of
reasons why it happened
stupid idea
accepting his ring
people asking
when and where
nobody asks why
papers get signed due to
a jumble of impulses
why buy a dress instead
of running away
too late to cancel
so keep blundering forward
until the taste is too bitter
can’t stand any more
make clumsy escape
slam all the doors.
Nina Rubinstein Alonso’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, New Boston Review, Ibbetson Street, etc., and stories were in Southern Women’s Review, Peacock Literary Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, etc. David Godine Press published her book This Body, and her chapbook Riot Wake is upcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She teaches ballet at Fresh Pond Ballet and edits Constellations a Journal of Poetry and Fiction.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Star of the Sea
Jean Varda
I was in a nightmare of Catholic girl’s camp
fluorescent plastic rosary beads on cement floors
butch nuns gnawing at my innocent soul
forced to eat sloppy plates of meat and
potatoes, lumpy oatmeal, cocoa with the
skin on top even if the girl at the next table
vomited in her plate
I was in a nightmare of gruff voices
and rough hands
where I cried in my sleep and wet the bed
My sister and I clung to each other
wrote tear stained letters to our parents
begging them to rescue us
I was in the icy Atlantic at seven every
morning, with no time to get used to the water
Feet ankles hips that last screaming
chill when your chest hits the cold
I made my bed smoothing the sheets
perfectly with my small hands
when I returned an angry girl from an
orphanage had stripped my bed and spread
sand on the smooth white sheets where my
body surrounded itself with fairy tales
at battle with her innocence
Jean Varda’s poetry has appeared in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Manzanita Poetry & Prose of the Mother Lode & Sierra, Avocet A Journal of Nature Poems, California Quarterly, and Third Wednesday. She has taught poetry writing workshops, hosted a poetry radio show and sponsored poetry events at cafes.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Ruptured Space Phil Temples
Scientists are baffled by the recent discovery of several towering, disk-shaped “pucks” of dark matter protruding for thousands of light-years above and below the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The researchers say the objects emit super high-frequency radio emissions and are some of the largest single features ever observed at the galactic core. Some of the pucks appear to be relatively smooth and symmetrical in appearance; while others are noticeably flattened and distorted “leaking” matter into space. It’s the first scientific evidence suggesting galaxies suffer from herniated discs.
Phil Temples resides in Watertown, Massachusetts. He's had over 140 short stories and a novella published in various print and online publications, along with three mystery-thriller novels, and a short story anthology titled Helltown Chronicles. Phil is a member of the Grub Street writing center in Boston, and the Mystery Writers of America.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Discarded
Heather Browne
She’s going through the change.
Discarded
like tacky pennies.
Useless
as cigarette butts
or tasteless wads
of Juicy Fruit.
Everything loses flavor with age.
Her body is an old bathroom wall heater
with smoky orange coils rattling.
A different decades’ model
charged obsolete,
unresponsive.
She’s cold now,
or suffering from the flu,
and nauseous.
With flashes of heat soaking,
she’s left out,
hanging,
to dry.
Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist, recently nominated for the Pushcart Award, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Electric Windmill, Apeiron, The Lake, Knot, mad swirl. Red Dashboard published two collections: Directions of Folding and Altar Call of Trumpets.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
hallelujah bowl-a-rama
Jake Tringali [i] met god in a bowling alley, picking up spares with casual ease. the florescent lights were blinding, against the waxed wooden alleys, the glint against the red balls, and god’s male pattern baldness. to this, [i] would submit. he took [me] back to his apartment, nervously stroking his neck stubble, and asked [me] about devotion before playing van halen’s greatest hits album. he smiled over [me], benevolently. he complained about the bowling league, his work as a vending machine repairman, his doctors, and then began the preaching. a homily about devotion. how to put others before yourself; your teammates, your lover, your god, all before yourself meaning [myself]. he seemed tired, for a god, and [i] just wanted to ease his pain, please him. [my] body was so small, his was so big and well-worn, so wide, with places to hide in, his body was the world, the whole wide world, he would devour and engulf and protect [me]. he smiles over [me], benevolently.
Jake Tringali thrives in a habitat of Boston dive bars, punk rock shows, and late-night adventures. His first poetry book is Poetry for the Neon Apocalypse.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
In Gloom, Praise Too
Lindsey Royce
I celebrate snowmelt, Sandhill cries, breeze on tattooed sleeves—
I celebrate the rebirth of our dead who tread on lake’s ice, cataract-white.
I celebrate fields during this blight poised to wipe out nations of people. Isolated, no gloves or mask, I celebrate every living breath.
This morning, I dared to hike the mountain, no dust to kick up like clapped erasers. Light stippled the unearthed roots, and leaves dazzled like stardust—
I dared celebrate those flashy leaves whose vacillations ushered my path to you, passed from our world theatre— You shucked disease for freedom.
With luck, I’ll see the dead in lilacs whose barrel chests puff and swagger, who pulse fragrance, gush color— With luck, I’ll see them in the neighbor’s mare
who breaks loose to splash in the lake, hooves bucking up white fireworks— tame enough to respect danger, and wild enough to give way to praise.
Lindsey Royce earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing/Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in numerous American periodicals and anthologies, including the Aeolian Harp anthology; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (periodicals and anthologies); Poet Lore; and Washington Square Review, to name a few. Her first poetry collection, Bare Hands,was published by Turning Point in September of 2016, and her second collection, Play Me a Revolution, was published by Press 53 in September, 2019. Royce teaches writing and literature in Northwest Colorado.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Party Shoals
Rick Blum
When you sidle up to me at the holiday party
to catch up on my kids’ latest exploits, or share
a joke that involves several seemingly impossible
sexual positions, or complain about the latest
screw-up your boss dumped on you without
warning or apology, don’t be alarmed if I just
stare back wordlessly; don’t feel insulted
when I fail to provide a ready retort, or break
into boisterous laughter, or sympathize
with your having to derive sustenance amongst
the duplicitous dolts of a disingenuous world;
and definitely don’t whip out your iPhone
to have Siri call an ambulance to whisk me
to the emergency room in my apparently
comatose state; instead, be patient, be serene,
for I am not being intentionally unsociable,
I’m just processing!
intently parsing the syntax of your perfectly-pitched
sentences, massaging every precious word ‘tween
the sagging folds of a shrinking brain, conjuring
connections to a memory bank of jumbled names
and fading events, while trying desperately to compose
a response that won’t embarrass either of us, one that
might even reflect a bit of wit if not deep wisdom,
or even, at a bare minimum, provide enough information
to push our conversation along a bit more than does
my increasingly frequent rejoinder:
Come again?
Rick Blum has been chronicling life’s vagaries through essays and poetry for more than 30 years during stints as a nightclub owner, high-tech manager, market research mogul, and, most recently, old geezer. His writings have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and WINK magazine, among others. He is also a frequent contributor to The Humor Times, and has been published in numerous poetry anthologies. Mr. Blum is a three-time winner of the annual Carlisle Poetry Contest. His poem, “Tomfoolery,” received honorable mention in The Boston Globe Deflategate poetry challenge.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Fifty Shades of Coronavirus
John Sheirer
He entered the dim bedroom where she had been waiting. “Sit,” she ordered, and he willingly did as he was told. Without breaking his gaze, she removed her bra and lifted it toward his face. The fabric was thick and soft and suggested the scent of lavender as it enveloped his square jaw, manly nose, and slightly parted lips. She pressed it firmly in place and his breathing quickened. He closed his eyes and shuddered with passion as his skin tingled. “Oh, yes, my darling,” she whispered, pushing him back onto the bed. “This will make an excellent breathing mask!”
John Sheirer (pronounced “shy-er”) lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wonderful wife Betsy and happy dog Libby. He has taught writing and communications for 27 years at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut, where he also serves as editor and faculty advisor for Freshwater Literary Journal (submissions welcome). He writes a monthly column on current events for his hometown newspaper, theDaily Hampshire Gazette, and his books include memoir, fiction, poetry, essays, political satire, and photography. His most recent books are a flash fiction collection,Too Wild, and a fictional thriller, Uncorrected.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Diaspora
Brady Peterson
You knew a framer whose wife
left him for a doctor. She was the high school
beauty, and he was the star running back. They married shortly after graduating. One day she wakes up, he tells you during a break.
“What have I done,” she says to the ceiling.
Got to give her credit for good sense,
you say. That’s true, he admits.
But you should’ve seen LeRoy chasing
the doctor around the hospital parking lot
with a hammer, another framer says laughing.
The whole crew laughs.
LeRoy died a few years later
while working a job in Dallas.
Heart attack. He was forty-one.
Joseph was a carpenter, but we don’t know
his story after Jesus was twelve.
Joseph, like MacArthur, simply fades from the narrative. Mary, on the other hand, is present at the cross.
The walls of the second Temple are torn down
by Roman soldiers almost forty years later.
The Jews driven from Palestine.
They rejected Jesus, your hometown preacher
offers as an explanation. They stood up to Rome,
you tell an old war buddy as the two of you drink
a decent reposado in a bar in New Mexico.
Brady Peterson lives near Belton, Texas where for twenty-nine years he worked building homes and teaching rhetoric. He is the author of Between Stations, Dust, From an Upstairs Window, and García Lorca Is Somewhere in Produce.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Murray, While Mall Walking, Takes a Wrong Turn
Paul Beckman
How would Jack Reacher handle this? That’s what kept going through Murray’s mind and then he realized that Jack Reacher would’ve taken out the sneaker thieves before they could bind his hands, cover his head with a dark cloth and duct tape his mouth. He didn’t see the duct tape but that’s what criminals always use. He begins to shake and realizes how cold he is and remembers the glimpse of the Good Humor truck with its back door open just before the hood blackened his world. He shouldn’t have asked the burglars to get him a pair of expensive sneakers and should have been like his other mall walker friends. Toasted almond Good Humor –he can’t get the thought out of his mind. Murray’s uncomfortable and squirms around on the floor and feels something soft and with bound wrists opens his hands wide and grabs the thing that’s been poking him in his back. He squeezes. Murray thinks if he didn’t know better he’s squeezing a boob and running his thumb across a nipple. The boob? moves, jerks back and quick head butts him. He can feel blood dripping from his nose and realizes that’s what Jack Reacher would have done. Then it dawns on Murray. He’s a hostage. And with thoughts of boobs and toasted almond kicking like Rockettes in a line he’s head butted again and passes out.
Paul Beckman is a retired air traffic controller. His latest flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press) was a finalist for the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Some of his stories are in Spelk, Necessary Fiction, Litro, Pank, Playboy, Thrice Fiction, and The Lost Balloon.
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