Jenean McBrearty: Relocation

America’s spacious desert skies

that linger in my eyes.

When urban winter descends,

I lament the terminus of my wanderlust

is a green pallet instead of rust,

and verdant hills that roll instead of red rocks that jut

from barren landscapes.

“You’d be happier in a trailer

on the Valley Slabs,” my son said,

and he spoke the truth

about the place where Okies and Arkies

encamped near the Salton Sea.

I long to be warm,

hear God’s voice in the silence.

What need have I of others who

don’t share my love

of a world without fences and freeways?

As long as I have water, sun,

and peanut butter sandwiches,

food for the cat, and books for the soul,

I’d be content to die

and lie with parched bones,

my ashes scattered in a place that mattered

to the Quechan and Cahuilla,

food for buzzards,

instead of ashes in a flowered urn. 

Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, who taught Political Science and Sociology, and received her MFA from Eastern Kentucky University in 2021. She won the EKU Award for Graduate Creative Non-fiction in 2011 for Mexicali Mamas, and a Silver Pen Award in 2015 for Red’s Not Your Color. Her novels, novellas, compilations of published, and stories in anthologies, are available on Amazon.

Alexander Gaul: Places Hurt

After Ovid

Places hurt. You will grieve if you insist

On re-visiting the scene of your first kiss,

Or the room where you lay together,

Lanterns winking on the lagoon, music

From the bar below, and laughter.

Breathe on them and half-dead embers glow;

Quiet longing becomes a raging blaze

When passion’s stirred by sweet remembrances:

Why tell of the half-dark room, the broken lamp,

Your clothes and hers scattered on the floor,

Her poised above you smiling, your name on her lips?

The King of Euboea revenged himself

By tempting the invaders to the rocks

With lights that seemed to promise safety—

And so they died. Let happy memories be

Your Scylla and your Charybdis—the sailors

Skirt around them, trembling, lest the edges

Tear their flimsy boats apart and haul

The men, lamenting, down into the dark. 

Alexander Gaul works in academic administration in a university in the South of Ireland. He is currently working on a project that combines translations of Roman elegies and love lyrics into a novel in verse. 

Lynda Tavakoli: WCNSF

wounded child no surviving family

eyes unshuttered

like a stare of owls

they swallow the dark

with parched tongues

their identities inked

on the surface of skin

as signatures for posterity

    

Noor (Light)

                    Khalid (Eternal)

                                       Layla (Night)

                                                        Nasir (Protector)

asleep upon the hands

of dead mothers

they remember the before

when touch was a cradle

of belonging

and the after a bloom

of stars in paradise  

   

Aziza (Beloved)

                       Amal (Hope)

                                   Farrah (Joy)

                                              Asad (Lion)

their silence shields them

for who can know

the slash of shredded limbs

exported from a screen

or the weep of crusting flesh

from what remained

of what remained

   

Nasir (Protector)

                Safiya (Pure)

                               Dahir (Victorious)

                                      Bashir (Bringer of good news)

gathering of the unclaimed

these children of ghosts

exhuming the darkness

for what was lost to them

these ghosts of children

nothing now to own

but our humanity

Habiba (Beloved)
                         Iman (Faith)
                                              Hamid (Praiseworthy)
                                                             Zara (Flower)
                                                                                    Lina (Tender)

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down and is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre. She has won several international poetry awards and been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lynda’s recent poetry collection ‘A Unison of Breaths’ is published by Arlen House.

Declan Geraghty: Eire, a Terrible Beauty

She hates me

she looks down

on me

overcharges me

refuses to house me

tells me that she knows better

loves the rich

she gets upset

if I contradict her

makes new laws

to keep me quiet

scolding her little boy

the one she doesn’t take out in public

as I wait under the floorboards

in the basement

she keeps tabs on me

then turns off the heating

she charges me

for potty mouth

gives me strange exams

to keep me down

saying the same thing

over and over again

but I never seem to listen

I hear the rats

scratching

in the walls

down here in the basement

they’re thinking of rising too.

Declan Geraghty is a  working class writer and poet from Dublin. He’s had poetry published in Shanghai Poetry Lab, Epoque Press, Militant Thistles, Cry of the Poor and the Brown Envelope Book. His latest short story featured in Lumpen London issue 11. He has won a mentorship with Words Ireland, and their national mentoring program for new writers. He's recently won a scholarship place with The Stinging Fly Play It Forward Programme, and been awarded a mentorship with Skylight 47 Poetry

Valerie Frost: Driving Lesson

I sat in the lap of your Wrangler jeans.

Your rough, worn pants didn't matter that day

because my legs were in charge.

You let me control the pedals and wheel

while you shifted the gears of your ’95 Civic.

I felt the firm, yet gentle, clutch of your free left hand

around my waist.

I soaked in your words of encouragement, as I

rounded the corners of      

                                    the winding rural roads.

            Three humid summer

            days in a row

            in that small Appalachian

            mountain town

            went like this.

On the fourth day,

when it was your turn to drive,

you took me on your four-wheeler instead.

With a slight head turn back toward me

and a husky Cowboy voice,

you instructed me to,

                                 "Hold on, baby."

I held on—

                            all the way to the cornfield. 

          I felt nothing the whole time.

When I lost my grip,

everything felt different.

There were no more driving lessons after that.

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.

Greg Watson: Your Obituary

I am reading your obituary, calmly, by lamplight,

as if it were merely a poem I came across

in these old papers -- not the mundane and obligatory

list of facts cobbled together on your behalf, 

of which you would most certainly disapprove --

but the one you wrote, long ago, for your

college writing class, when you were so young

and such an exercise must have seemed amusing,

a mere novelty to be redrafted and played with.

In this telling, you have become the survivor 

of your own demise, able to alter, delete, 

and transform the details of your life, just as you

liked to do when you were in the midst of it.

No one liked a good story more than you. 

So, I am reading of your birth across the Atlantic,

how your very identity was kept a secret

before you were sent by steamship to be raised 

by film stars deep in the Hollywood hills.

It's a tale you could almost make me believe,

and one that you certainly wished were so.

You are no longer here to say, your narrative lost

among the silence that now becomes a kind of

signature -- everything you have left out,

by choice, chance, or simple forgetfulness, faint

red ink on onion skin receding from view.

The ocean hums. Your fiction is safe with me.

Greg Watson's work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Stars Unseen, published by Holy Cow! Press. He is also co-editor of the anthology The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood, published by Nodin Press. For more information, visit www.gregwatsonpoet.com. 

Jessamine O'Connor: The Most Moral

Today I watched a man

rolled casually off a roof

by the boot of a uniformed soldier

who nudges him over and over

like this man is some object

he’s found

His friends look on

while he shoves with his foot

until the slack body flops,

bends back

and drops.

The soldiers amble off,

disinterested in the fall

or its impact

But in a minute they return,

this time they’re swinging

a second man

like a black hammock –

one, two, and he’s clear -

slumped down the side

of this building

we’re watching

Then a third, kicked,

hit and thrown

from the same roof

and judging by the energy invested

this time, it looks to me like he’s alive,

or was

I can watch this

from several angles

so it’s not difficult

to judge, though some papers say

these were men, acting

uncharacteristically,

their army will investigate -

as if this is not policy -

so the bulldozer waiting underneath

to bury the evidence

must have been

circumstantial,

but anyone with eyes

can see an endless skyline

of rooves

just like these.

Jessamine O’Connor lives on the Sligo Roscommon border. Her collection ‘Silver Spoon’ is published by Salmon Poetry, she has chapbooks with Nine Pens Press and the Black Light Engine Room press, and is this year's winner of the Poems for Patience competition. She is an editor with Drunk Muse Press and The Poet's Republic journal, and her debut novel is forthcoming with Lilliput Press. www.jessamineoconnor.com

J.R. Solonche: Funerals

I need to go to a funeral.

I haven’t been to a funeral

in a while. I don’t remember

the last one I went to. I need

to go to one so I don’t forget

what death is all about.

I need to meet people who

for years were part of my life

but are now only part of my past.

I need to meet the relatives

and friends and colleagues who

have been only names brought

up in conversations. I need to

go to one more funeral before

I die. I don’t want the deceased

to be a friend but a third cousin

I met once at another funeral

or a neighbor I waved to those five

or six times during the years we

lived on the same road, all those

forty-five or forty-six years. I need

to go to his open casket funeral.

I need to see his face for once.

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of over 40 books of poetry and co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.