Raptor by Wendy Ingersoll

By the river, a great smudge of dusky bird

abruptly separates from the oak—

a bald eagle, beating at the breeze.  I break

into a jog. Where river meets creek

he wheels, heads north on the lesser current,

alights upstream.  I slow my pace.  

Herons spill from the reeds,

cards peeling off a deck,

rasping as they cut the air.  A pair

of ospreys startle, cree, swoop.  I scurry on

past cardinals red-flagging the bank

like words refusing to be blocked —

faithful so long as we both—  I veer

to follow the creek.   That’s when I see,

high in a sycamore, the eagle’s nest—

I spot his hulk above the knitted sticks. He lifts,

flaunts north— no eagle, but a buzzard, bizarre

as in a carnival mirror, bamboozling the day

like an old pipedream.

Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll’s book Grace Only Follows won the 2010 National Federation of Press Women Contest and was a finalist for Drake University’s 2012 Emerging Writer Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Passager, Caesura, Controlled Burn, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination.  She’s a retired piano teacher.

Banjo Birds and Circles by Dah Hemler

Outside, at this café,

the muddled noise

from so much chatter.

The color of the sky

is a blue circle.

At the same time, a woman,

dressed as a hillbilly,

strums a banjo in such a repetitive way

that each recurring chord is like

the metallic backwash of a sickness.

The birds have stopped singing

out of fear

that the intrusive banjo is a predator.

Abruptly, a table of older men

erupts into extended laughter.

The deformed banjo noise stops.

The birds are singing again, and,

with hasty movements,

the Hillbilly packs it in and moves on,

and my eyes can do nothing

but follow her until she disappears.

The color of the sky

is a blue circle. The sun

is a yellow circle. The café tables

are black circles. And the birds,

with their ancestral songs, are all

that is needed to complete

this circle of beauty. 

Dah Hemler's poetry has been reviewed most recently in The Sandy River Review, Stone Voices Magazine,Diverse Voices Quarterly, Orion Headless, Words & Images In Flight, and Miracle Magazine,and is forthcoming in Perfume River Review, and the Berkeley Poetry Review. The author of two

collections of poetry from Stillpoint Books, his third collection is to be published by Stillpoint Books in 2014. Dah lives in Berkeley, California where he is working on the manuscript for his fourth book.

June Evening Along the Glen by Megan Duffy

I do not want ties.

The branches of the linden angle down here,

do not move but for the wind.

The sinking sun is mindless—it does what it does—

again and again it returns to its floating shelf.

Just here is a spider winding her way up to her swollen eggs.

She clings to her creation, a dangle of instinct housed

in hyaline weave, barely detectable against white-not-white-gilded cloud.

Never having wanted to become a mother,

I have resisted such primitive threads. Yet I spin them out reflexively

each time I touch her face, each time I kiss his forehead goodnight.

But this evening I have left them sleeping in their beds,

have walked to the glen to sit, untethered.

Relief from reliance comes to me like sharpened sight—

the muskrat sinks again in fetid mud.

Its tail is a hollow stick, slapping out the current.

Above my head, the luna moth hazards a guess:

nothing matters but flight.

So agrees the range insect, one I cannot name,

that sits on the blanket beside me, waiting for me to rise.

Megan Duffy has been reading and writing poetry since she was a child. Her poems have appeared Off the Coast, Blood Lotus The Wildreness House Literary Review among other journals. Poetry is forthcoming in The Lindenwood Review. She holds a BA in Literature, Writing, and the Arts from Eugene Lang College: The New School For Liberal Arts and an MA in English Literature from Rutgers University.

A Month of Masks by Katherine Yets

My boyfriend left me

and thought it was a good idea

to send me a picture

of himself every day.

This was over a year ago,

and now, I stumble on one of these photos

and laugh.

Black and white for dramatic affect

his head cocked to the side

bar light illuminates his face.

His finger rests on his temple,

and I wonder what he was thinking.

Katherine Yets recently received her BA in English with a writing emphasis from UW- Whitewater.  She currently resides in a small hodunk town in WI, which inspires her daily.  She plans to continue on to graduate school in the very near future.

Uncle Archie by Iain Macdonald

 Like nearly all the island lads

he couldn’t swim a stroke,

yet brought his skin back whole

from three straight sinkings

on the Murmansk Run.

He drowned off a fishing boat

in peacetime,

the familiar coast of home

slipping from his eyes.

Ian Macdonald was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland and currently lives in Arcata, California.  He has earned his bread and beer in various ways, from flower picker to factory hand, merchant marience officer to high school teacher. His chapbooks Plotting the Course and Transit Report are published by March Street Press.

Twelve by Bailey Bloyd

Embrace the body.

Embrace the overdeveloped,

underappreciated goddess that you are.

There is no manual

for what you have.

You have this vessel

that men will die for

and boys will cower from.

Cushioned skin covers your hips

And tightens at your waist.

Thighs scream to kiss one another.

Summer will not be your season

but baby you flourish in the Winter.

Because this body before you,

not the mirror,

has already been written.

You are a vivid

violent blossom,

waiting to erupt.

Bailey Bloyd is a senior at Marywood University in Scranton Pennsylvania. She will be graduating in May with no job but a BA in English and writing. Bailey focuses on spoken word poetry and creative nonfiction. She is a New Jersey native, bagel enthusiast and poor college student. 

WHIPPER SNAPPERS by Shareen Knight

Oh you young whippersnappers,

vampires flinging down your words

like petticoats, not stones,

don't call your mother a whore

and stop blaming my generation

for all your woes.

                   

Take up a pen, if you must, but please stop

your simpering prose. First, name a grandchild

or two. Wait until you've crossed the country

a time or two. Slept beside the road in Big Sur,

then you'll know the price of rice.

That is if you don’t run straight home from such a rude waking.

Wait until you’ve tried a dozen or more professions

before you try to tell anyone how hard it is

on the soft side of your lazy life. Then, we will listen.

Because you’ve paid the price of admission.

And, it will show.

So, keep writing.

And talking your game.

You’ll get there, if you’re not too careful.

THE END

Shareen Knight is an artist and playwright who loves images and the rhythms created by words.

Secrets (at sixty) by George Bishop

When the day’s finished

coming apart, I kick what’s empty

all the way to bed, or stand
and stare through the eyes of a penny

in plain view of the penniless
in me. Sleep and sleeplessness—

they’ve set aside their differences,
forged a peace bled of secrets.

Such things can no longer survive
in short lives and solitudes. So,

tell me what is was you wanted

to share when you knew nothing

was sacred to me, when I was drunk
on differences. What to do with

the confessions of one day
except to believe them until

it’s time not to believe them.
It’s time not to believe them—

my ghosts are listening, they know
you’ll say it some other way.

It’s the only way to keep it

a secret, from coming apart.



George Bishop’s work has appeared in The Commonline Journal and New Plains. Forthcoming work will be featured in FLARE.  Bishop won the 2013 Peter Meinke Prize at YellowJacket Press for his sixth chapbook “Following Myself Home”. He attended Rutgers University and now resides in Saint Cloud, Florida.

Two Poems by Frank de Canio

"Passing Muster"  

You glowed in Shakespeare’s Measure play with art
enough to make me wish you were my wife.
And yet you parlayed Isabella’s part,
as supplicant to save your brother’s life,
to Caesar’s Antony. How fast you’d slough
off femininity in your pursuit
of leadership. Nor would I give you guff
if I’d been Brutus poised to prosecute
his doomed campaign. So when you rendered meek
Cordelia in Lear, as soft as fluff,
it fascinated me that you could pique
my sensibilities, thus, off the cuff,
as Antony. And no more than your bluff
in simulating prowess seemed enough.

"Spirited Advance"

Forget the  bossa nova, galliard,
or women led by partners in a dance.
It’s more exciting when a gal, en garde
while fencing, chooses a proactive stance.
For then a guy’s not forced to press his suit,
or feint and parry to secure a match.
He just need raise his blade up in salute
in order to be privy to a snatch
of agency from an abortive fray.
And while most men prefer a solid hit
with penetrating thrusts of their epee,
a fencer who would rather coast than boast,
scores better with a woman’s strong riposte.



Frank de Canio was born & bred in New Jersey, works in New York. He loves music of all kinds, from Bach to Dory Previn, Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets.

Two Poems by Jessica Williams

"Tangerine Peace"

 In my youthful hubris I was apt to think
that the self was the epitome of all this

substance that I was no Socrates to decipher.
And yet while I was on the brink,
on once another dizzying gyration of my
private samsara-of-sorts,
befallen again by some wearisome blow,
I crumbled like breadcrumbs falling,
falling from the fingertips of fate.
Lost in myself, a sea of doubt and my own
Charybdis rising to piece apart my ego
one ravenous mouth after another.
This dissonance was never my aim
but somehow I will catch myself leaning
toward gratitude, for every arrow slung
while my fortress grew weaker still.
But a tangerine peace quells the thought
That I had suffered any injustice,
and had I never broken down so completely,
I may have never found this placidity,
a glowing a candle in my darkest chambers,
the loss of self in a selfish world.



"The Fog Commands"

The fog is thick, verging on oppressive.
Its limbs reach out, ever extending
into buildings, and trees, and people...

The scent, delicate, faintly surfacing a memory that,
like the fog, is too transparent to grasp.

It is quiet; serene becomes too void a word to explain

how the fog commands beauty to hang in the air,
to mottle greens and yellows and reds,
to settle among us, in this dewy solitude.



Jessica Williams is a sophomore residing in humble Elkins, WV. She is pursuing a B.A. in English, alongside minors in education and psychology. She enjoys poring over literature, running Cross-Country, and occupying a lonesome table for one—breakfast hours only.

all that glitters by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

I saw a sparkly backpack in front of me and didn’t know where to turn.  The canvas was black but consumed by clear gemstones two inches in diameter from top to bottom and side to side. It was bedazzled, one might say, up the wazoo. I did not even notice who was carrying it. Maybe she had auburn hair.  I did not know whether to run from it or run to it. Oh to molest it with my fingertips- to touch something bumpy and glitzy and cheap and expensive at the same time. I had wandered into a crazy zirconia dream or nightmare.  I don’t think this backpack just held homework or lunch or important files. I think it communicated with things that made crop circles. I think it found lost children. I think it helped stalled engines and donated to charities.  I think it detected spyware. I think it knew Morse code and sign language and was probably interviewed by NPR as the next big thing.  But be careful, even in two seconds I knew it was capable of murder. That was clear. There was darkness in this sack that baby deer fled from. Have mercy on you if your arms fell asleep carrying this sick caked thing. It walked away from me in the end.  It went right and I went left, glittering in the sun light, blinding me, nudging me into a candy coated sparkly wasteland.



Jennifer MacBain-Stephens received a B.A. and a B.F.A. from New York University and currently calls the Midwest home. She has poems published in Superstition Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Red Savina Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Burningwood Literary Journal, The Apeiron Review, Dead Flowers: A Poetry Rag, Star 82 Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Rufous City Review, Squalor Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Untitled with Passengers, Gravel Magazine, Sein und Werden, The New Poet, Scapegoat Review, Menacing Hedge, and Iowa City’s 2013 Poetry in Public Project. 

Things to Do Before an Apocalypse by Scott Volz

Forget the bucket lists:

We’re talking bunker lists—
predictions of The End more regular
than a man who takes his Metamucil.

True, theories thus far have been
as wrong as the weather man,
but I’d say it’s wise to prepare
when zombies are no longer a dark horse.

There are practical things—
in case you’ve got survivor stitched
in your DNA.

          Learn to like canned food and not showering.
          Start reading science fiction so you know
          of wastelands—the earth cooked like a kebob
          left overnight on the grill.

If you’ve any hope for a future,
you’ll have to fight. Who knows what
will be left beneath the burning sky.
Mole-people? Mutants? It could be
just you and the environmentalists—
and they won’t be a cheery lot.

          So trade your Xbox for kickboxing
          and shift acronyms: PBS to NRA.

But more than anything,
before the badness comes to blow—

          tell the one you love that desire will burn
          after solar flares scorch the earth,
          that the holocaust would be greater   
          if hearts flipped like magnetic poles.

          Say you’ll be Adam to a damned race
          so long as she is Eve, carrying on the sin
         of Eden when the only birds are crows.
         
          Because she makes you crazier
          than the Jesus freaks trumpeting revelation,
          than the dictators at home and abroad.



Scott Volz graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Evansville in 2008. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Thinking About God by Peter Schaller

Is it wrong to think about God
when you’re lying
on a bed in a cheap motel room
with a heart recessed
into the ceiling, and an enormous
mirror on the wall?

She is younger than you
but old enough to want
to be there.
You are old enough to know
that you should avoid
cheap motels.

Her weight on top of you
keeps you from floating away,
or running
or simply disappearing
into a less organized
collection of matter.

You tell yourself
this will be the last time
but it’s not the first time
you’ve had that thought.

Instead, your thoughts wander
to God
or Buddha or Allah or Krishna or…
and how you should be walking barefoot
on the path towards enlightenment.
But you have chosen
this narrow street, littered
with broken illusions.

Managua, Nicaragua

7 December 2012



Peter Schaller is an activist and artist who lives and works in Nicaragua. His work has appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Jelly Bucket, Alligator Juniper, La Brújula and Soul Lotus.

Two Poems by Charles Thielman

"Layer Ink Over Caesura"

Caught shooting the sun’s tangent

through the smoked filters

of his instrument,

his gaze bores inside flame.

He postcards thoughts

across created distance,

heart to soul, his fingerprints

all over his vase of fragments.

Petitioning the muse with ink, he vectors

a tonic inside an age-spotted hand,

inside pulse, craft attaching its arteries

onto shadow edge as twilight slips out of roots.

He imagines his hilltop bench

a captain’s chair facing the horizon’s mirage,

soft wind rippling dead calm, driftwood waiting

for a tide, the ambiguous privilege of being

perceptive inscribing sharp notes,

stanza to stanza, as chaos riptides closer.

An old dream hangs like incense above

his yellow vase. He layers ink over

each caesura,

some distance from leaving

his scars to the weight of stones.

Sky bearing a red and gold canvas west.

"A Painting, An Early Morning Walk, and All the People"

Faces of this age, inbound,
transit under city towers.

          Tip of paintbrush inside canvas rivers.

My eyes wander in a white sky,
drawn as human
to our magnetic stutter,
hands in pockets.
   
          Distant jackhammers cube the air.

Trees wanting a wet gray shine,
the strokes of a sable brush
lay cart tracks down on
canvas gravel, through pools of water
reflecting November overcast
and the skies of a seagull's cry.

          Let the vandals worship their statues.

At the bus-stop,
I stand back and watch
children make churches with their hands.


Charles Thielman was born and raised in Charleston, S.C., moved to Chicago, educated at red-bricked universities and on city streets. He has enjoyed working as a truck driver, city bus driver and enthused bookstore clerk. Married on a Kauai beach in 2011, he is a loving Grandfather for five free spirits.

Two Poems by Emily Strauss

"Night Driving"

imagining buffalo herds grazing

under the moon's white haze

the grasses dipping to the rifling

breeze, or stars behind the drifting

clouds after the last glow disappears

quiet— motor humming on straight

lines of roads shining under
occasional lamps, a lighted rest

stop, chicken shack, late open bar

flashes out to the black asphalt

country music stations appear

quiet— they fade over the next

rise, static passing through keeps

you awake sitting still, counting

each exit, billboard, distant

farm house down its dirt lane

but you drive on unnoticed, mere

headlights sweeping the barn

quiet— a momentary glare, cows

blink half asleep, a fox stands still

in the ditch, waiting, you stare

stiff, shoulders hunched, dark

beyond the margins, the hills waver

and settle again, imagining

their own shadows and the outline

of your truck as you blow past

throbbing pistons against them

"The Old Road: Footprints"

Lost among the tall sage

two bare ruts separated

by bitterbrush and poppies
ground into fine beige dust:

at sunrise appear small tracks
footprints of pocket mouse,
coyote, deer— tiny rises
and hollows arranged just so.

When the quick rain arrives
big drops throw themselves
into the dirt, erase the five-
spotted prints with an urgency

of their own, pelting the road
until the sand forms ridges—
afterward the signs erased
as if the night never was

shrews and woodrats
didn't venture out, stand
a moment motionless, cross
the old road in the moon.


Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry. Over 130 of her poems appear in dozens of online venues and in anthologies. The natural world is generally her framework; she often focuses on the tension between nature and humanity, using concrete images to illuminate the loss of meaning between them. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.

Two Poems by Gene Goldfarb

"Coke in Amazonia"

The farms swam quietly past

our bus window

surrendering to a rainforest
of fig and sandpaper trees
on an endless tongue of red soil
and green-brown darkness,

our deepening silence broken
when we reached a fork
and a large old sign for Coke
magically appeared

and our growing gloom
pierced by cheers
of yay, yay, yay
as if returning home

and a sweet bitty in the back
started warbling
“I’d like to teach the world
to sing...” as if she’d woken

from a coma of twenty years
expecting the stars to have
behaved and stayed exactly
where they’d been before.

                                                                         
"The Classic"

Without a jacket he leaves the library,
his cover a dull hue of green perhaps,
a pebble finish, nothing to bring notice.

His only designation
a few words on his spine, a surname,
he’s more between covers than undercover.

The old in town know him or of him,
the young stay away, jeer him in the streets
and throw rocks, hoping he will leave.

History had been unkind to him,
a father who threw him into the fire,
the man’s poor wife who rescued him.

But he would outlive them all
without the indignity of peer vouchers,
awards, appearances, or groveling.



Gene Goldfarb was a hearing officer over 30 years. He now does volunteer work. His poems have appeared in Bitterroot (defunct), more recently on WRHU FM (Calliope’s  Corner) in 2008, in 2011 Poetry Ark, and in Cliterature (Fall 2013). Currently, his work is scheduled to appear in upcoming issues of Empty Sink (December 2013) and A Narrow Fellow (April 2014).

the poverty of philosophy by Howie Good

I waved a dollar out the window.

We brushed hands as he took it.

Thank you, he said. I said nothing,

just rolled my window up

and  waited with renewed impatience

for the light to change.

You know how it is,

I couldn’t help but doubt, at least a little,

the crudely lettered sign he held.

Then I remembered

that cavemen depicted running animals

by giving them eight legs.

Howie Good has been published in The New Verse News.

Helping a Football Player Write a Poem by Tim Suermondt

He insists on confessing “I’ve never gotten poems”

and he’s both surprised and pleased

when I tell him “Sometimes neither have I.”

I assure him no matter what poem we come up with

it will be better than anything I could do on the gridiron—

my Gale Sayers moves alive only in memory.

I suggest he be aggressive with the first line

and he writes ‘I am the Quarterback.’ Good, and in short

order we have a serviceable twenty line poem—

one able to withstand the image I failed to resist,

the guard and tackle opening a hole for the fullback

“You could drive a mack truck through.”

We print the poem out and he folds it in half, lifts

his arms skyward, turning and saying “Touchdown!”

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: Trying to Help the Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010). He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.