poetry

Put me in the poem                          

says the single cherry blossom petal
suspended on a spider’s web

Greg Feezell lives in Yokohama, Japan. When he isn’t writing, he attempts to teach poetry to his middle school students.

Where the Next Meal Is

No, it’s not a crumb that’s sprouted legs
but I can’t tell until I bring my face

up to its brown and white stripes.
This mini-bead shuffling across my table

is what Google calls – oh no – a carpet beetle, not
the ladybug I hoped for, prayed for, bringer

of good things. I’m on alert for a red pepper
pearl shell with solemn black spots, sacred

scarab sister for my restoration mission. I’d love
to greet her at the center of this dining wheel

where a lit candle holds court. But no, I’ve this
traveler – a wilted bouquet’s renegade.

What if her tribe erupts into legions that gorge
upon my meager silk and cotton garden?

M. Nasorri Pavone has appeared in The Cortland Review, River Styx, New Letters, Harpur Palate, The Midwest Quarterly, DMQ Review, La Fovea, Slant, Roanoke Review, Bluestem, Stirring, Chaparral, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Quiddity, Confrontation, Sycamore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Tule Review, Cura, Rise Up Review, The Citron Review, The Broadkill Review and elsewhere with one in the current Rhino and others upcoming in Borderlands and Innisfree.

She is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and lives in Venice, California.

Vegetable Archive

julienning my hands, trying to
pickle nineteen-years-old among
white malt and “what’s your major again?”

yeah, seems like something
i would do.

people are poem ideas or bags of
undercooked potatoes clumping against
communal bathroom mold if
a short, zucchini-smelling woman
did not peel the walls each tuesday with bleach and
“ope, sorry! didn’t know someone
was still in there.”

this cucumber skin packs me
tight till summer when i scream it
off and mature at my mother’s discretion
into something more girly, less
oregano, less “do you
still believe in god?”
less “are you too
angry?”

keeping all this in four yellowed
jars, dilled under grandma’s cellar
because maybe i might forget which
scars were already there

and which ones are fresh cut.

Alex Carlson is currently a full-time undergraduate student at an Iowan college where they work part-time as a writing tutor. Some of the things they like best include green onions, cowboy hats, and pine trees. They’re an enneagram type eight and an INTJ (obviously a psychology major.) Make what you will of all this.

On Death and Living

My mother used to tell me that
although I wasn’t a fussy
baby
on difficult nights, an earache, a nightmare
it calmed me to have
the bridge
of my nose
stroked gently with the pad of her index finger
bridge to brow
bridge to brow
So
even in the sterile scented hospital haze
over the huff of the ventilator
and
well-meaning interruptions of her fellow nurses
a gift,
and I stroked the length of my mother’s nose
bridge to brow
bridge to brow

Emily Mosley grew up in a small lakeside cabin in rural Georgia but has spent the last six years in the gritty wonderland that is New Orleans. She can often be found sneaking into strangers’ yards to smell their flowers and pet their cats and is mother to three surly but hilarious daughters.

She will sing you to sleep

She will sing you to sleep with long
sentences, endless, excessive, as you watch her
gaze, a comma or two, irrelevant and irregular,
blending into the Times New Roman of her tone,
till you feel your eyes grow weary, waiting for
the steady breathing out, the completion of a rhyme.
She sings you to sleep.

When you wake there are harsh syllables to grab
at you, yell, threaten! Lots of consonants, biting down,
just to prove their point – No Night! – No End! Her
pitch is high, her tongue sharp, and she! Breathes! Not!
Full stops and exclamation dribbling down her chin
yet her inhale-exhale: shallow. Woken by
words.

She will sing you to sleep again with her long sentences
when she’s older and tired and her words are just
unsure components of an alphabet which her brain is watching
walk away; she smiles softly and, though there are tears,
there is still the sweetness of sibilance
the quiet of her voice
till you’ve both been sung to sleep. .

Zofia Zunyth is an aspiring poet and writer, currently residing in the UK. She likes to imagine, and write about, the life of strangers in the street, and hopes that they too can imagine themselves within her work.

Today

screech
rustle
sneeze, cough, chorus,
Thank you.

low hum
door slam
clickclack
Nothing.

A match strikes the horizon,
the day set alight.

Everything is going to be alright.

Ellen Higgins is a daughter, sister, friend, student, and, sometimes, a poet. Her work has previously appeared in Kissing Dynamite Poetry Journal and Crossways Literary Magazine as well as in The Piranha: Trinity’s Satirical Newspaper.

This Way Or That

Something lit
the edge
of the field
and is just
standing
there – patiently –
as if amused
that the fire
could spread
this way
or that
and the only
way to tell
is to keep
watching.

Dan Mallette lives and teaches high school in San Antonio, Texas with his wife, son, dog, and rabbit. Currently, he is mildly afraid to go outside; therefore, he is baking too much, writing just enough, and playing outside in the back yard with his son in the afternoons.