M. Benjamin Thorne: The Commissar’s File

You sit at a desk, like ones you’ve seen before,

open the folder of all those who informed on you—

and eyes spill out, so many eyes. Brown ones,

blues, green, so many. The eyes of neighbours,

teachers, co-workers, cousins and uncles…friends.

You recognize them all. Even those of that odd

kid met in Komsomol. They gather on the floor

around your ankles as they fall, open wide, boring

into you. Some you expected, even greet with a nod.

Others lack the decency to look away in shame.

And then you open the other file, one you made

over years, sitting across cigarette haze,

and there is one final pair of eyes,

the only one to move, looking everywhere,

and blame gets choked down like bile—

you recognize them as your own,

and suddenly, you’re blind.

M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Feral, Gyroscope Review, Molecule, Red Eft Review, and Thimble Lit Mag. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.

Mark Mayes: A Winter's End

When will there be

a winter's end?

said the robin

to its friend.

It is but begun,

said the hunter

with dog and gun.

When will the earth

warm the seeds?

Never, said frost

as the holly bleeds.

When will we be fed?

said the baby birds.

Not until you're dead,

were the winter's words.

Mark Mayes enjoys writing poems, stories, novels, songs, and the odd piece of non-fiction. 

He would love one day to try writing a play. He has a Youtube channel, @hopeisthething1965, and a Substack: notes from a bungalow.

Michael Durack: Keepers

The grass doesn’t even grow where he stands on the pitch.

- Brazilian proverb.

In the schoolyard an afterthought, 

last one standing after the captains’ picks, 

the flabby or uncoordinated one,

fit only to fill a space between the jackets or sticks.

Later to metamorphose into an acrobat, gymnast, 

air surfer, an exotic yellow bird or black panther.

Hands-on custodian, lord of the penalty area.

A man of mystery, aloof, impassive, a lone eagle, 

prey to rituals and superstitions, wizard of mind games. 

Master of innovation (Yashin’s rushing off his line,

Neuer’s sweeper-keeper, El Loco Higuita’s scorpion kick.)

Shoot-out hero, fall guy (a hapless De Gea or Calamity James.) 

Ageless cap-centurion (a Shilton or Buffon, a Jennings or Zoff.) 

Poets, pontiffs and philosophers practised that eccentric art: 

Pope-to-be Wojtyla and poet Yevtushenko guarded the net;

Camus commanded the box and thought outside of it;

Nabokov, self-confessed daydreamer in a Cambridge goalmouth;

and cúlbáire Kavanagh, seduced from his goal 

by the music of a Monaghan ice-cream van.

But last one standing no longer a stigma; 

the keeper the chosen one, his gloves, his gleaming shirt 

a different colour from the others, unnumbered;

first name on the team sheet, above the rest.

Michael Durack lives in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. He is the author of a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and three poetry collections, Where It Began (2017),  Flip Sides (2020) and This Deluge of Words (2023) published by Revival Press.

Ellie Ness: Daddy's Shoes

It’s how he taught her to dance,

placing tiny feet on top of

his plates of meat, spinning her

slowly round the room,

using muscle memory

to help her learn

and slowly, softly, she fell into rhythm

pirouetting on her own,

trusting feet to take her where

she wanted to go and so, on her wedding day

at the father-daughter dance

they both remember him teaching her how to fly.

Ellie Ness writes poetry for fun. She has been published most recently in Gallus, Specbook 24 and The Battlefield Collective's book Tales From the Southside.

M. J. Arcangelini: Sunday Mass at St. Coleman's

Late 1950s

 

Young enough that it was no surprise

I would fidget in church, looking around,

bored, at the adults filling the pews, there

was one woman, older, although who

knows what older meant to a kid my age,

I remember the fox stole she always

had draped around her shoulders, the

heads of all the foxes were still attached,

with one head biting the butt end

of the next fox, I could see their teeth,

their tails hung down her back, I wanted

to touch them, to pet the foxes, but the

one time I tried my mother slapped

my hand away, frowned and shook

her head at me, “no”, she even tried

to get me to stop staring at them but

whenever her attention waned my

eyes knew just where to go, I wanted it,

I wanted the foxes to start moving so I

could play with them, I wanted to see

them running around the church

barking at each other under the pews

scaring the old ladies, especially the

one who brought them into church

with her and wouldn’t let them go,

I wondered how she got them to lay

so quiet, I hoped they would wake up

and bite her before they escaped.

M. J. Arcangelini,(b.1952, Pennsylvania) has published extensively in both print and online venues & over a dozen anthologies.  He is the author of 7 published collections, the most recent of which are Pawning My Sins, 2022 (Luchador Press) and Fierce Kisses (Rebels & Squares Press) 2024.

Wendy Webb: Bloody Pedals Leaving Solicitor’s Drunk

Fortuitous it was not,

reaching Wansfell Pike with bloody pedals.

Blisters raged blood from a stone

beyond Jenkyn’s Crag.

All Windermere, like a map, spread out.

Woodland wandering, bare rock, delightful.

That long trudge into Troutbeck,

no time to pause at The Mortal Man,

Old Rosie’s best, a shade of pink.

Hellish, climbing, kitted out;

that bloody solicitor drunk

on a late lunch/fat fee.

Stumbling to the heights, all earth in 360o:

pretty please, no BPPV here.

Pathetic idiot of a solicitor, cycling my resources

up a mountain. Munro…more likely.

Blame the drunk, peddling humour at

solicitor’s long lunch. The drunk, my pater,

releasing funds conditionally:

for his one and only.

Sobering, that, leaving the Big Smoke,

weekend cycle racing clearing head.

Would I spend real estate on mountain bike?

Idiopathic, contemplating pedalling Cumbria.

Bloody pedals leaving solicitor’s drunk’s final

instructions: pedals up Wansfell Pike, else

generous donation to Battersea Dogs’ Home.

Backpack painful every bloody step; pint

in The Mortal Man… photographic evidence

for that sober solicitor. No idiopathic benign

paroxysmal positional vertigo repeat.

No pater, just spirits relaxing.

Wendy Webb from the North Midlands, UK, prolific poet, published with Reach, Sarasvati, Quantum Leap, Crystal, Seventh Quarry, The Journal, Frogmore Papers, Acumen and online through Wildfire Words, Littoral Magazine, Lothlorien, Atlantean, Poetry Wivenhoe, Drawn to the Light (Ireland), Seagulls (Canada) and Autumn Voices, and local radio on Poetry Place.

Mark Russell: Recent Fragments

Fearful cows. Proud buckets. 

Sequestered and barbed.

Three freckles. A constellating of anchors.

Violating space.

The long road travelled 

and the long road ahead.

Each length, perfect reflection of the other.

You are travelling as a mirror. Roving.

Violating time. 

Swallowing hours. Draped. 

A shroud of volition.

The sky is still crying. The sea is angry.

You hear it sometimes, 

underneath the wind’s wails.

It can hear you. Sometimes. 

But always it sees.

Violating mind.

What it sees sends the sun to sky, 

turns rain to tears of joy

that drizzle down, 

dousing the faces of fearful cows,

collected in proud buckets.

Infatuated with all forms of art, Mark Russell primarily engages with words and images. He's written two novellas, a few dozen poems, and is currently writing his first play. Visually, he enjoys juxtapositioning serenity with chaos, via nature and live music. He grows a beard in his spare time. www.instagram.com/nativefear

Ralph Culver: Last Call

What the mind fashions, what the mind does not,

she says, but no way I’m being sucked into that dialectic.

A freezing wind follows someone through the door

and claws its way up the inside of my pant legs,

finishing the job that her voice had begun an hour before

of dismantling my sense of ease and rightness in the evening.

The bar is half empty. This was long enough ago

that you could still smoke while sitting at your table,

and I light one as she slowly drains another shot of ouzo,

the achingly deliberate rolling of her wrist, then

the equally precise wiping of the back of the other wrist

across her mouth. In fact, this was long enough ago

that I had already “stopped drinking”—or rather,

that drinking had clubbed me into abstinence—

and I suddenly, vividly recall a night in the same bar,

a more distant time and woman sitting there

across from me, when in disgust I had watched myself  

strain to complete a sentence with a full ten seconds

plodding by between each sodden word I spoke.

She beckons to the waitress, coral smeared

across her knuckles. And now, she says, the mind

fashions that you will drive me home,

and the mind does not fashion that you will sleep with me.

If this be youth with its glory passing into shade,

I think, give thanks, its dissolution overdue.

She reaches for my cigarette and knocks

the empty shot glass over.

Ralph Culver has work recently published in Plume, The High Window (UK), Modern Literature, and Queen's Quarterly (Canada), and forthcoming soon in On the Seawall. His latest collection is A Passable Man (2021); his new book of poems, This to This, is coming out in 2024. 

www.pw.org/directory/writers/ralph_culver

Wanda Morrow Clevenger: the same week my mother-in-law passed

at the cusp

of midwest coronavirus

inside the Carlinville Walmart

was a lady

trussed in surgical mask

our eyes locked

for a few seconds

as our carts rolled

past each other

in total silence

at a perceived safe

six foot distance

the associates seemed

more polite than usual

as though they knew

the funeral was on hold

Wanda Morrow Clevenger lives in Hettick, Illinois, population 200, give or take.  Her seven published chapbooks can be found on Amazon.

Samuel Louis Spencer: Sourdough #12

You called me. You called me and maybe

you ran out of bread, perhaps you need

another loaf left at your doorstep.

You called me and said you found more

of my belongings, said I should come and

get them. You called so I’m driving

over, loaf of bread resting in the backseat

like the child we never had.

Samuel Louis Spencer is a poet and journalist based in Tampa, Florida. His work has appeared in The Decadent Review, Scapegoat Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Inlandia, Third Wednesday, Barzakh Magazine, and others.