Ojo Olumide Emmanuel: Shards

Bruises are measured with the pinch of a finger.

i crave your voice & a morgue came.

i have unearthed my heart for you

i search my ears for the last beep of your voice, your laugh.

this world is strange, but what's more strange is

how each passing moment drowns you in an elusive frenzy

of what could have worked.

i observed my feet, they ache.

ached from a journey i thought had ended.

& damning thought that what/who

you call home is only a steam in a kettle- it never stays

it leaps & distance keeps stretching itself

the first poem i wrote after you became a bird is that:

if you were a dove, you'd bear home on your back & return

but when the poem conjured an owl, i knew you had gripped

the night & night is a peevish hope-

it dribbles dawn even when it tries to flicker rays on dimples.

again, in my meditation, i saw a gale around a stream.

i was washing my weariness & i tried to hold you in my arms.

as i came nearer, you dissolved like a gust of glucose on the tongue.

i waited, stared at the nothingness you've become;

i prayed & prayed & prayed

& i went back to bathe my weariness a second time.

mum says, someday your wings will dust itself above my roof;

she exhorts that i feed my heart butter because

hope does get fat & when it is plump,

it morphs into faith. & yes, i have faith, but

i have never tried it on what's lost.

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel is a Nigerian Poet and Book Editor. He is the author of the Poetry Chapbook "How Flowers Pollinate Before the Arrival of Butterflies (Authorpaedia, 2022). He is the winner of the Nigerian Prize for Indigenous Language (Pidgin, 2025) and the WeNaija Literary Contest (Non-Fiction, 2023).

Jackie Chou: God Is the Best Timpani Player in the Universe

Circular ripples

punctuate

the wet pavement 

I open the glass door

stepping into 

the frigid air 

How quickly 

my hair dampens

in the outpouring!

I tilt toward 

my reflection 

in the puddle 

The music of rain 

has drummed

into my ears

How close 

I have come to 

tipping over

Jackie Chou is a poet from Southern California. Her work has recently appeared in Lee Herrick's Our California Project. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sorceress and Finding My Heart in Love and Loss (Cyberwit Press). 

May Garner: To Learn To Endure

Some things arrive without asking:

the tilt of a jaw,

the way silence settles in the chest.

I carry my family in my body –

every apology that went unspoken,

every night that taught us

how to swallow silence.

Some things arrive without asking:

the tilt of a jaw,

the way silence settles in the chest.

This is how we are passed down:

not in stories, but in what we learn

to endure.

May Garner is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for nearly fifteen years and has been sharing her writing online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Find her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).

Howie Good: AI Blues

It’s a cold, hard world – literally. The snow on the ground has crusted over. Walking the dogs or out to the car is as treacherous for someone with my old bones as wing walking in an aerial circus would be. Aging has broken me little by little, part by part, kind of like a slow-acting poison. My heart is chipped and dented, and my head crawling with monsters. No one knows the real me, including me. In the Book of Isiah an angel touches the lips of the prophet with a burning coal in a rite of purification. What can I help you with today? my AI copilot asks.

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

Daniel Romo: Sequel

I’m uncertain if the man in the Target parking lot

is actually playing or if his clarinet is merely rigged

to the speaker welcoming tips and ignorance;

that’s how it goes until perception meets finality.

And when I recently sat next to my 20-something

son watching a movie about magicians, the sound-

track I played for myself was different than when

I sat next to my now 70-something dad a decade

ago and saw a movie in which a man killed a

Grizzly with only a knife and grit. These days

I’m filled with more answers than questions as

if I forgot to ask the basics such as, How was your

day, son? We either succumb to or strangle the

bears that appear before us, the way a dad shapes

or breaks a legacy with his bare hands, and at 52,

I’m only now beginning to examine the effect

my callouses have had on those whose hands

I’ve ever held. After the movie, I hugged my

son goodbye until the next time I flew in to

see him and I stepped into the center of the

subway car, my body balanced by a pole as if

propping up a man learning how to mend each

bad note he’s ever played.

Daniel Romo's latest book is American Manscape (Moon Tide Press 2026). More at danieljromo.com. 

LaVern Spencer McCarthy: Looking At My Brother's Photograph

 I was washing dishes the day

my brother was slapped into the Army.

Smirking and bold, loaded with

eighteen years of belligerence,

he was lounging at the kitchen table

bad-mouthing my uncle, not there to defend

his treacherous ways.

 

Mother, always handy with water-blistered knuckles,

knocked Harold all the way

to the recruiter's office.

Afterward, a Greyhound bus

propelled his furious momentum

toward boot camp.

 

He returned two years later

body-bagged and silent, all rebellion

lost in a rice paddy somewhere in Viet Nam.

Mother cried, but I stood at his coffin

angrily plucking petals

from his spray of long-stemmed roses,

wondering how he came to be dead

from a single slap.

 

 

LaVern Spencer McCarthy is a state and nationally awarded poet. She has written and published five books of poetry, five books of short stories and three journals. She is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas and National Federation of Poetry Societies. She lives in Blair, Oklahoma.

Mukut Borpujari: Stoic

It’s already summer, and we’re getting rid

of clothes, getting ready to greet

the scorching days ahead;

making the place airy and less cluttered.

We’re living on the edge, restructuring the house,

getting rid of the old furnitures,

obsolete machineries and funny gadgets.

A small table in the kitchen for two. Our world is

changing, our wardrobes mostly empty;

gone are the skinny jeans and the fancy moccasins—

the windchimes and the trinkets.

When someone comes to visit and admires

our complete works of Yeats,

the peacock feather in the open thesaurus,

the mantle vase on a shelf, we say

take them. This is the most important

time of all, the age of dissipation,

knowing full well what we are divesting is

like the fragrance of a burning incense stick

that lingers hours after it has been doused.

An ordinary Friday afternoon

when one of us stared,

and the other one just laughed.

Mukut Borpujari (he/him) is a freelance writer and a poet. He has a plethora of poems and articles published in top journals around the world. An active member of the Greenpeace Movement, he has a deep-rooted conviction about nature and the natural world. His other hobbies include computers & Internet, and driving.

Paulette Calasibetta: The Blood We Share

in dusty archives

you carried silent hope

walked

damp earth

marked by granite

headstones

weighted   memories

hushed

beneath the soil

you carried

a birth certificate

like a memento

haunted by

faceless names

wrinkled

and frayed

in the width

of time.

your beard

grows white ~

fingers tremble

unsilenced hope

flows in the

blood we share,

our mother’s

secret

unearthed.

Paulette Calasibetta is inspired by nature, and the spirit of the human condition; motivated by celebrations of life, and the weight of the hollowness of grief. Published in Ariel Chart, October Hill, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Spank the Carp, and various other publications and anthologies.

 

Bernard Pearson: PLEASE BE AWARE!

In the coming emergency,

dreams may have to 

be shackled, children 

cleaved from their

mothers' breasts,

lovers not to our liking

may have their hearts impounded

and the homeless hungry

made to eat the sidewalks.

Everyone must play their part in

the coming emergency.

Bernard Pearson's work appears in many publications, including; Aesthetica Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, The York Literary Review. In 2017, a selection of his poetry, ‘In Free Fall’, was published by Leaf by Leaf Press. In 2019, he won second prize in The Aurora Prize for Writing,

Allan Lake: R & R

Deep inside this open-door cafe

a nervous sparrow lands on back

of chair next to one I occupy.

Fly on table top is perfectly still,

like nothing bad could ever happen.

How Boeing of this identifiable,

beautifully-crafted flying subject.

Nothing in this place is mine

except espresso in the tiny glass

because I paid for it. Sparrow

and fly are freeloaders, skilled

thieves with no currency or sense

of shame. We three are not really

together, do not have a common

language, could just as easily be

somewhere else but all landed here

with a clear sense of entitlement

for refreshment and relaxation.

Allan Lake is a migrant poet from Allover, Canada who now lives in Allover, Australia. Coincidence. He has published poems in 24 countries. His latest chapbook of poems, entitled ‘My Photos of Sicily’, was published by Ginninderra Press. It contains no photos, only poems.