James Penha: The Capriciousness of Crackers

For an unusually short haul of potatoes from Long Island to the Bronx market I got to ride with my father in the cab of his truck. Rare gift enough, but he said the real treat was  a chilli lunch at Red’s—I figured that meant cold cuts—but when we hauled into the parking lot the sign didn’t say Red’s, it said The Big Road Rest, so I asked why Dad had changed his mind. “Oh, don’t worry, son, this is Red’s all right. You’ll see why.” And I did. The owner had a carrot-top head of hair and more freckles than all the beans in the pot out of which he ladled us bowls of chilli. It was the thickest soup I ever had, and I made myself like it cause Dad loved it and he hoped I would. What I really loved were these hexagonal puffs of saltines Red called oyster crackers when he offered me more to crush into my chili which wasn’t chilly at all, and I found no oysters in it or any pearls in the crackers which was fine with me as I was having a lot of what Dad called rights of passage.

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) lives in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published. His newest chapbook of poems American Daguerreotypes is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

Angel Altamirano: I have two dogs

One of them lunges at me in my sleep. 

I awake with a startle. 

The other presses her cold wet nose to my face.

I awake with a smile.

On my walks, one dog leaps into my stomach, taking me by surprise.

I feel the wind knocked out of me.

The other dog walks beside me, looking around at the birds, sniffing the crisp air.

I breathe in the air with her. 

One dog sneaks around corners to pounce and bite at me.

I move about carefully, wondering when it will reappear.

The other dog lays in her usual spot, looking softly at me.

I always know where to find her.

At night one dog loudly bounds all around me, pulling at my hair. It demands attention.

I do not sleep.

The other dog gently snuggles in beside me, warming my side. She snores softly.

I doze off.

I have two dogs.

I’m not sure they get along.

One dog seems to fear the other.

It finds fault in her soft nature, her silly games seem only to frighten it.

I had two dogs, now I only have one. 

She’s a good dog. 

Angel Altamirano is a 32-year old Mexican American, working in software.

Stephen Boyce: Hem

You have cut the cloth

assembled the pieces

to make something useful

something that fits & adorns

You turn to the hem

– a womanly word

measured / tender/ strengthening

a word that needs breath

a soft outbreath

that ends

where the lips meet

You are bent to the task

in a trance of sewing

You fold & tack

the selvedge

stitch & trim

Just so

A threshold turned back

pressed

to leave a margin

a border

where cloth lies upon cloth

drawing a straight line

between something & nothing

I turn to you

wanting to fold back the years

with their creases

raw edges and loose threads

to lay the fabric of my dreams

upon yours

smooth the surface

stitch & trim

Just so

Stephen Boyce is the author of three poetry collections, Desire Lines (Arrowhead 2010), The Sisyphus Dog (Worple 2014) and The Blue Tree (Indigo Dreams 2019) and three pamphlets. He is co-founder of Winchester Poetry Festival and lives in north Dorset. stephenboycepoetry.com

Abigail Ottley: Widow's Walk

Evenings, she puts on her second-best hat

skewered by a tortoise shell pin,

buttons up her heart in her mohair coats and

goes out to pick a bone with the moon.

On the red-leaded step she scans the stars,

imagines them sparks from his hammer.

Her heart is fierce and as his chisel,

weighs like a bag of four inch nails.

In her pocket she’s packing a fistful of humbugs,

matches, twenty Players Weights.

She hears the black kettle hissing on the stove on stand-by,

the relentless ticking of the clock.

On her tongue, a retort fit to slice a man open.

In her head, a dozen what ifs.

[Originally published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, 2021]

Abigail Ottley writes poetry and short fiction, A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and twice winner of the Wildfire 150, she came second in the 2024 Plaza Prose Poetry competition. Her debut collection will be published by Yaffle's Nest in May, 2025. She lives in Penzance in Cornwall.

Maurice Devitt: Recidivist

It was only when he reached the house,

that he remembered he didn’t live there

anymore and that she had most likely

changed the locks. It’s funny how

the stresses of a day can cause us

to seek refuge in the patterns of the past.

Her family home, he still remembered

the first time, standing on the step,

wondering whether to knock or ring

(she had told him there was a strict house

preference, which he had quickly forgotten),

and hoping that she would answer,

not her father, it would be easier

to explain the forgotten corsage.

Maurice Devitt is the Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site. His Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, ‘Some of These Stories are True’, was published by Doire Press in 2023.  

Nick Browne: The Road to Ethiopia

i.

Each day at nursery you’d cling,

an angry monkey scarfed around my neck.

Detached with kindness from my arms,

I’d hover in the vestibule to wait

for Rosemary to whisper you were fine,

though leaving was a trick I had to learn.

ii.

Your leg meccanoed into place,

immobilised and morphined into calm,

I left you in the hospital in Leeds,

wrapped my car around a pillar on the way.

The motorway’s a rod that spanned the space

through me and to the setting of your bones.

iii.

The airport and your luggage for three years

teeters on a caravan of carts.

We’re masked and must be distanced in this hall,

a practise for the distancing to come.

And I the monkey scarfed around your neck,

this leaving is a trick I’ve yet to learn.

Nick Browne is an established novelist. Nick’s poetry has been published by Acumen, Ink Sweat & Tears, Blue Nib, Snakeskin, Archaeology Today, Anthropecene, Wivanhoe, Lunar Magazine and Dreich and has appeared in several anthologies. Nick has collaborated with award winning painter, Laura Matthews on her recent exhibition ‘Flux’.

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