Valerie Frost: Miss Counsel

She keeps the record narrow.

I keep testing jurisdiction.

Every time I call her Counsel,

she files another objection.

Sustained.

Fine.

I’ll rephrase.

Tell me why your poker face

keeps entering evidence

when nobody called it

to the stand.

Tell me why

you cross-examine a room

with one raised eyebrow

then act surprised

when I request

a sidebar.

Counsel,

I am trying very hard

to respect procedure.

You are making

procedure difficult.

There are rules here.

Probably.

There are boundaries,

precedent,

ethical obligations—

and apparently

an unreasonable amount

of eye contact.

I move to strike.

You deny the motion.

Naturally.

So we continue:

your argument precise,

my attention compromised,

both of us pretending

this proceeding concerns

something else entirely.

You keep asking

for evidence.

I keep reminding you

that circumstantial

still counts.

You say

speculation.

I say

pattern.

You say

objection.

I say

noted.

Counsel, Counsel—

please stop looking at me

like you already know

what I’m going to say.

Or don’t.

Actually,

withdrawn.

No further questions.

For now.

Because you keep

the record narrow,

and I keep

testing jurisdiction,

and every time

I call you Counsel

you file

another objection

and still—

you do not

move to dismiss.

 

Valerie Frost lives in Central Kentucky with her three joyful kiddos. Her poems have appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, ONE ART, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Laura O'Hare: Examining Pavements

 

Laura O'Hare has had several poems published in the late 1990’s, in 2025 and 2026. She has performed her own and other peoples poems in the Crescent Arts Centre open mic nights, and at the end of term show for the Crescent Writers Read.

Shontay Luna: Me, to the Exercise Instructor

Dude,

I can 

tell you 

love

to dance.

I like to 

dance, too.

But I’m 

new to your

class and to 

the steps

of your 

routine.

I’m not used 

to freeform 

but find myself

more often than 

not, improvising 

to the point of

marching in place.

While I patiently

wait for you to take

it down a notch,

emerge from being

in the zone, to a

sequence that I can 

actually

follow.

Shontay Luna is the author of four chapbooks; most recently ‘The Goddess Journal.’ Credits include Rigorous, Bombfire and Brittle Paper, among others. After majoring in Poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she remains there with her pens and notebooks. IG: @shontayluna

Keith Robert Stewart: Death of An Artist

Houses were easy to draw,

With a door and four squares.

Smoke from the chimney was

Always a curly telephone cable,

Curtains were spotted butterfly wings.

Each line had an absolute simplicity.

Each blot was confident in its

Placement.

Painting and drawing were easy.

Confidence oozed from my fingers,

Certain that I could represent

A house on my page.

Years later I had to

Pick up the brush again.

O Level Art was a chore.

In drawing, the rubber was used

More often than the pencil.

I struggled to represent the detail,

Doubting my strokes and dashes.

Gone was the innocent eye,

The naïve gullibility of a child.

The beautiful simplicity was lost.

Keith Robert Stewart has been writing poems since childhood (1970s?!) and has recently plucked up the courage to read publicly and submit for publication. 

Trevor Patterson: Fair City

In the poets’ fair

city an old ha’penny

carries me over

to the Southside. I

cross, stroll with the memory

hunters, among folk

and languages not

from here, with camera and open-

mouthed purpose, tourists,

Trinity Old Library,

fulsome, bronzed Molly, local

cupping her exposed

breast.  I pass someone

shouting at us to repent

through a speaker, with

her watching man friend.

I want to repent, like others,

sheepishly walking

no thought to stop with

the sleeping man, head rests in

the gutter. Could have

been a corpse. Are we now

immune to the lost souls in

our streets, to begging

bowls from takeaway

cups?  Am I now in the poets’

unfair city?

Trevor Patterson lives in Helen’s Bay, Co. Down and is a fresh emerging voice in poetry terms.  His poetry currently explores his surroundings, identity and belonging, and he is experimenting with a range of style and form, from traditional, modern and free verse.

Yvonne Higgins Leach: Saving the Dead

The dead don’t care about grave robbers because the dead are dead.

It’s still being alive that’s the problem. Who would ever want to wake up

to pitch black and the wood roof of a coffin, choking for air and to be heard?

 

Young Frenchwoman Victorine was believed dead

and promptly buried. Rescued when her lover raided her grave

to cut locks of hair as a keepsake and she murmured.

 

The soldier from Wellington thrown from his horse

and when declared dead was duly buried. He woke to the voices

of others and his muffled screaming shook the dirt.

 

The Englishwoman in 1848 who drank too much poppy-water

fell unconscious and was pronounced dead. Later heard sobbing

from her grave, fingertips fleshless from so much scraping.

 

Saving the dead meant alerting those above ground.

A glass pane carved into the coffin, family checking for mist.

A tube attached to the coffin to smell putrefaction.

 

No more nailed coffins but a key for the lock.

A cord tied to the hands and feet and the person,

awake!, frantically rings the bell above ground.

 

But that design proved flawed because when the body

decays it swells and shifts, yanking the cord and ringing the bell,

relatives shouting to the sexton to grab his wood spade and run fast.

Yvonne Higgins Leach is the author of a poetry collection In the Spaces Between Us (Kelsay Books 2024). Her first collection Another Autumn was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2014. She spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com

Paul Murray: The Docker Memorial, Newry

1.

Lots of rain and one dry walk

In a town wedded to water:

River, ship canal, estuary

And a pathway at Albert Basin

Where I meet the docker, fused

With the tackle of his trade

Into a single metal entity,

He points his rope-rifle at an angle to emptiness

Steep enough to evoke

Coasters berthing, in haloes of steam

In what is now mid-air

And a distant skyline, but it was,

Back in the day,

The nerve centre of the town.

2.

Tautness of the docker’s sawn-off rope

Evokes the weight within a day

Of winching, carrying

And digging out hills

Of coal, and stone.

Weight within a day,

Measured in tons.

If it was capped by camaraderie

And a brief buoyancy of spirit

As a shift was ending,

Mainly it was misery

And drudgery. Hardship.

A passport to an early grave

Or living in an aftermath

With aching limbs.

Bread on the table

But dust in the lungs,

Living in the shadow

Of a stolen youth.

Mainly it was men

Whose blighted lives laid down

Allowed a town to prosper,

And mainly it was women

Working fingers to the bone

To keep the home afloat.

3.

Lots of rain and a dry twilight

For strolling on Albert Basin.

Buildings bolted against the night.

St. Mary’s Church and environs,

In a darkening vista,

Two lights come on like eyes.

The gulls as water audible,

Straws in the wind

Of the width of what lies beyond:

Ocean’s restive massiveness

Weighing in from the side.

Somehow, I see the docker

Slip free of his frozen frame

And share a quip

With invisible friends,

A lightness that laced them

As a ship departed.

Now the ships are gone forever,

Taking the dockers with them

And a metal man remains

Taking aim at empty space

Where a world was washed away

By a force that outflows water.

Paul Murray has had poems published in the Poetry Ireland Review and Agenda Poetry Magazine.

Mitali Chakravarty: Autumnal Musings

Do you think I will die 

because my hair is grey 

and I lie quietly on my bed? 

I hold the stars in my eyes, 

and the universe. Galaxies 

are still part of my being.

My past lies in the stardust 

that chanced into a bubbling pot,

spicing it with a bit of magic. 

I bubbled into being — young 

tiny — sub-microbial, curious, 

awed by the evolving plenitude. 

Over centuries, I morphed

into this form that lies 

limpid dreaming the future 

while ticking off the past. 

One spring, I will moult. 

Know that I have suffered. 

Suffering dwells on the past. 

The future only anticipates

in hope on rare spring-days. 

Mitali Chakravarty wafts on a cloud where rests borderlessjournal.com. Her poetry can be found online on Poppy Road Review, Fixator Press, Saaranga, Masticadore Canada, Daily Star, Piker Press among many other places. 

Mary Ann Honaker: Static Electricity

I remember when my high school friend

stayed over for the night and we watched

The Doors for the first time. It filled us

with crackling energy, an urge to be and do

something memorable. We climbed out

the basement window into the wide dark

and walked down to the interstate bridge.

We hobbled over rocks until we were at the top

directly under the swaying, pulsing highway,

terrified and thrilled by how much

the road moved. When the big rigs

rolled over us, the road was an ocean

and we were underwater.

It may seem like a silly, childish grasp

at life, but we were static electricity then,

sticking to this world, on a night now clinging

to memory.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023), Night is Another Realm Altogether (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026) and the forthcoming Doors of Fire and Night (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2027).  She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

Nathan Thanki: The John Hewitt

I watched a man hit another man

across the head with a pint glass

the last time I was here.

Didn’t like something about him –

the way he spoke, the way he looked

when he picked up his pint.

My old friend Arthur used to say

this is where all our free thinkers drink.

That’s why it’s one small room, divided.

We’re all full of jokes and

we’re all full up of this anger,

never sure which.

Nathan Thanki is a human ecologist and writer living between North Belfast and Fusagasugá, Colombia. His poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Four X Four and Panning for Poems. His prose writing can be found at nathanthanki.substack.com.