Jean L. Kreiling: Musicians of Spain

i. The Dulcimer Player (Toledo)

 

The tune, unknown to me, must have been old—

its phrases answering each other neatly,

its contours those of well-known stories told

with native confidence. She was completely

absorbed in it, seemed unaware of those

who paused to listen, her eyes on the strings

from which she plucked bright highs and dulcet lows

as piously as priest or cantor sings.

The grand cathedral only steps away

held precious crosses, statues, mysteries;

her poor man's harp moved some of us to pray

with gratitude for earthly victories.

And some heard solace, lilting antidotes

for grief, in her devoutly summoned notes.

 

 

ii. The Street Violinist (Madrid)

 

You don’t make much dinero there, she said,

with vino-tinto-slurred exasperation,

but he picked up the small black case and fled

toward downtown—and not much remuneration.

He knew that if he played there for a while,

the passers-by would listen, gratefully,

and some of them would nod or leave a smile

along with coins, and then just let him be.

They wouldn't see the flaws that she deplored—

his lack of wit and shrewdness and ambition;

there on the street he might not be adored,

but he'd be heard, and thanked without condition.

Years past the last time love lit up her face,

he finds more warmth outside the tapas place.

 

 

iii. The Guitarist (The Albaicín, Granada)

 

At dusk, just through that keyhole arch, he stands,

head bowed and back against the wall—alone,

but not quite: wood and string in his strong hands

respond to his embrace with blood-warm tone.

And now the evening knows how to begin:

the air can cool and learn again to float,

the fading sun can yield to its mild twin,

and calm can reclaim souls with every note.

The man plays Spanish music—heart-bent sighs

that fill the gaps between the cobblestones

and soften whitewashed walls and fill some eyes

with grateful tears and settle some tired bones.

The man just through that keyhole arch unseals

the secrets with which evening soothes and heals.

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of three collections of poetry; her fourth will be published later this year. Her work has been awarded the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honours; she lives on the coast of Massachusetts.

Cheryl Snell: Genealogy

The sofa in the funeral parlour

breaks away and I am a bird

forever blinking in the gloom.

At this banquet of death, I eat

the endings of my ancestors.

Their toxic genes garble my cells,

my misaligned synapses. Their ends

are keys to my beginning: brain bleeds

and disorganized hips ambling down

through generations. If you read

my cards, you’d stop believing in luck. 

It’s one way to hide from the truth─

there are no good deaths in this family.

My grandfather’s naked body sent

to one wife by the other, my sister

too contagious to kiss goodbye.

Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has or will appear in Flash Boulevard, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, On the Seawall, Midway, Blue Unicorn, and the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.

Jackie Chou: Far From the Balcony Gate

I had to get away 

though I knew 

you wanted me to stay

You don't know how

the jangle of your keys

makes me flinch 

Or the clang of your heels

heavy like a stone bell's toll 

My tongue freezes 

at the tip of a hello 

And I dream of becoming 

the shrinking dot

of a raven in the sky

Jackie Chou is a poet from Southern California. Her poems have 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).

Colleen Addison: space

in the space that exists now because you don’t write me I sit on a central American deck the yoga mat unused on the planks and a coffee cup next to me dregs dark at the bottom the room visible through the sliding doors with its twinbedspushedtogether the howling of monkeys and chitterchatter of birds I don’t know feels silent as a soundtrack without the beep of your text and yesterday the pitter of rain fell beepless onto the doors the hotel clerk called my name in the dark that wasn’t you either and now a squirrel runs from leaf to leaf like gymnastics but less elaborate I get up not to check the phone but to take a photo the squirrel leaps again and it is gone

Colleen Addison completed a PhD in health information; she then promptly got sick herself. Her recent work has been featured in Giant Tentacles, Halfway Down the Stairs, and River Teeth. 

Lauren Sarrantonio: Earthly Travels

I’m on time

at the airport gate,

where a dream’s void opens

green at the foot of my seat,

an invisible weight

speaks from it, 

Where are you, the stories we didn’t write,

the gardens we didn’t grow:

chamomile, rose, basil, thyme. 

Where are you, the hair

that never went grey, on

the phone or the bike– our simple earthly travels.

On letters folded three and a half times

inside a standard envelope sent

by the Postal Service:

“The way in which I write poetry is pretty bizarre,”

you mused, undisrupted, typewriter ink from the upstate farm;

Harvest Moon played on vinyl, and you swam

in the muddy pond.

You taught me everything, even how to stop existing,

and the terror of losing a teacher.

Who will show me the way,

or change the channel at red lights?

Who will leave books at my door in the hope of August,

bring me to the gnarly, gritty, grace of age,

and watch these fires dance to nothing?

I’m really trying to love myself this time.

Who will help me remember?

I wrap my wounds with apprehension,

brooding– I don’t want to get better.

I do want to keep going.

Lauren Sarrantonio is a certified speech-language pathologist, yogi, musician and poet. You can find her at @numinouspalms.

Sunday Review: ‘Terminals’ by Nathanael O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s third pamphlet with Canada’s above/ground press is, as the title suggests, comprised entirely of the terminal form. As the book notes, the form was invented by Australian poet John Tranter, where "the final word of each line in a source poem us used as the end-word for each line of a new poem”. A sizeable challenge in itself, as O’Reilly maintains not only this end-words in this new pieces, but the same order of words and stanza structure for each poem.

Sourced poems come from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Jessica Traynor, John Keats, Jane Clarke and others. The terminal device opens up a second level to the collection: the reader can source the originals, read and contrast them to O’Reilly’s re-imaginings, and admire just how inventive and challenging the new works our. Repeatedly, O’Reilly has been able to craft the restriction of the end-words into his own narrative, which often explores the need for isolation, and an affinity with landscapes. In ‘Settling Down’, the poem starts off as an innocent description of a beach scene, with surfers and fishermen. Then, unexpectedly:

They do not know my remains

will be scattered on their beach, blown

out to see, the evidence of me

settling down in one place at least[.]

This affinity drives the theme of some eco-poems in Terminals: closing poem ‘Autumn Lament’ chides humanity for not taking take of the earth – “The planet won’t let us off the hook | for the debts we owe’. The phrase ‘damaged earth’ is repeated from the opening poem, serving as neat bookend for the theme.

Tied closely to this connection to the land is the want for escape, mostly from other poem. The speaker in ‘The Landscape’s Singing’ hopes “for a fertile summer | writing poetry in the turf-shed”. In ‘Archaeology’, the opening action of ‘I close the door’ double downs on this shutting away of oneself, seemingly a much needed retreat: “I dig for the ancient me | sometimes feared vanished”. Although this is some connection with others elsewhere, such as remembering studying Picasso with a friend, or dwelling over a past love, the separateness creeps in. Equinox asks the ex-lover to “wonder | in my arms are lovelier than aloneness’. ‘Equinox’ sees the speaker wishing for ‘inspiration, solitude’, the two apparently inseparable.

There are a few flexible applications of the end words here and there: Heaney’s ‘place’ becomes ‘homeplace’ in O’Reilly rewriting; Duffy’s ‘hesitate’ shifts to ‘hesitation’; while Larkin’s ‘lace’ becomes hidden in the word ‘placed’. To this reviewer, these liberties are permissible: one would rather see a slight deviation, rather than have the language feel forced and unnatural in order to meet the demand of the original end-words. ‘Sweet Movement’ goes one step further, and retains the syllable count for each line as well from George and Ira Gershwin’s song, ‘Embraceable You’.

Looking at some of the end-words in isolation, one might marvel at the shift from the source poem to the new poem. ‘Remember’ takes from Ellen Bass’s ‘Any Common Desolation’. In one part, the end-words are ruminant, ginger, signs, mother, gathered, toes, etc., potentially unconnected to each other as the answers in a crossword puzzle. O’Reilly transforms these into a call for calmness and patience:

Wait. Become ruminant,

Meditate. Peel and grate ginger,

sip healing tea. Search for signs

of chance. Remember your mother,

how she believed in you, gathered

you in her arms, tickled your toes,

made you laugh until you lost breath,

distracted you from darkness. Sit in the yard

imbibing the moon[.]

Terminals is a work of transmogrification, with surprising and pleasing results throughout, and is certainly the strongest work O’Reilly has published with above/ground press, which is known for championing experimental and restricted writing. A rewarding read, and for fellow writers, one that will inspire them to try their hand at their own terminal form.

Terminals is available to order now from above/ground press.

Andrena Zawinski: What Remains

...where sight vanishes into nothing...there has to be more 

than dust, wind-borne particles of burning earth... - Phillip Levine

What remains of the wooden farmhouse 

    tucked down off the road

         after the fire

is more than the blackened porch planks 

    or piles of dark cinder 

         floating across foundation.

What remains are those floorboards 

    creaking beneath bare feet 

               after the thunderstorm 

drove us in and into each others arms 

    to hover in candlelight 

         beneath its weathered roof.

What remains is a dank rattle of shadows 

            during sleepover parties

                        with children fled under beds 

from ghosts imagined stealing through air 

    and only in winter. 

        Summers they’d pump 

the well’s rusted lever that gave up 

            no more than a groan

                        having given up 

on water that could not rise 

            from an exhausted 

                        spring below.  

What remains are those days cradled

            inside a bald truck tire 

                        retrieved from the roadside berm 

and swinging from bull rope 

            looped about the muscled arm of oak 

                        lightning struck but couldn’t take down

that remained safe in its promise to stay put 

            even as it seemed to sigh a surrender 

                        under the weight of us 

and even if to wither to bloom but bloom again,

            before the landlords 

                        burned the house down 

it's worth more as insurance money char than rent.  

What remains of that old farmhouse 

            at the city’s ragged edge 

                        one that would have fared better 

out on some cape farther east

            taking on the fierceness of wind 

                        or rugged rush of waters

are the years we lived with it

            with its pantry full of what 

                        the garden gave up 

of its wild garlic, onions, tomatoes, corn 

            in air fragrant with basil and dill 

                        and the yawn of days 

filled with squeals of neighbourhood kids

            racing its wraparound porch. 

                        What remains is more 

than parch and scorch––its invisible rooms 

            still forcing themselves up 

                        into a canopy wild with leaves.

[Originally published in the collection 'Landings' by the author]

Andrena Zawinski’s poems have received accolades for free verse, lyricism, spirituality, social concern and have appeared in Progressive Magazine, Rattle, Santa Fe Review, Slipstream, and others with work online at Women’s Voices for Change, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry is Born Under the Influence.

Mary E. Ringland: Lost Boy

i.m. Michael Hurrell, 1984-2008

Here, listen to this, you said, eager to press play 

on Tiesto’s mix for strings – stringing us along 

to Barber’s Adagio, a funeral anthem adulterated 

by sonic synth, raising us from the humdrum 

for all of six minutes, thirty-two seconds,

lost in the club-culture remix 

of your benefit-funded Ibiza.

You were a gladiator in a self-styled movie,

pulse fluttering like a moth 

beneath destiny’s paperweight – your truth 

trapped in a one-bedroom failsafe – freed 

for a moment in a techno smokescreen. 

Michael, how could you know you were 

rousing a requiem – summoning a trance 

to lure you to a place in time – more infinite 

than your twenty-four years.

Michael, how could you know those strings 

would echo like a strobe light through eternity 

– resurrect the spirit of a lost boy.

Mary E. Ringland is a therapeutic counsellor from Larne, County Antrim. Her poems have appeared in The Storms Journal, New Isles Press, The Morecambe Poetry Festival Anthology, Live Encounters, and The Bangor Literary Journal. Mary recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the Open University.

Sam Calhoun: Colitis

Fresh cut wound across the morning sky--

Late for work, stopping to make it later--

Count the highway stripes to the next exit

as sparrows flush one maple to another

above the stench of asphalt.

Crows begin again from ropes

thrown like hummingbird vine tendrils.

Across the field harvested corn lies spilled,

kernels ringing against the crisp grass.

A busted tire, unpredictable in the field--

The field ready for the trouble of winter rain--

The rain steady for what comes next.

Sam Calhoun is the author of five chapbooks. His work can be found in Cosmic Daffodils, Eratos, and Cold Moon Journal. He lives with his wife in Elkmont, AL. Follow him on Instagram or X @weatherman_sam, or his website, www.weathermansam.com

Lara Dolphin: Whoever It Was

after “Whoever She Was” by Carol Ann Duffy

They see me as only a mythical creature

on city art.  Not alive. My jaws,

still new, chew through the cap. I smell the wax

mingling with lemony pheromones.

Bee, say the giant voices of the keepers

of the round helmets. Bee.

A grist of insects, suck nectar

or pollinating crops for food. The buzz

of tiny wings repeatedly. I do not mind. 

Perhaps someday. If you’re very lucky.

The cycle repeats. The comb is 

crushed and strained of honey. When you 

think of me, I’m an orchestral interlude

played on violin. Bustle of music. Listeners’ delight. 

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A bit of zizz hangs on the petals. My scientific name

sounds wrong. This was the garden.

There are the coneflowers. Packing sweetness

Into hexagonal cells. For when they come. 

Whoever it was, forever their veiled eyes watch it

as it journeys from snapdragons to primrose. 

It cannot be my kind and still I have a jar 

of light amber honey to prove that it was here.

You remember the precious things. Sunny days

or finding your way home. One bee doesn’t matter. 

You fix your dead apian eyes on the drone 

which is spraying insecticide on your field. 

A native of Pennsylvania, Lara Dolphin is an attorney, nurse, wife, and mother of four. Her chapbooks include In Search Of The Wondrous Whole  (Alien Buddha Press), Chronicle Of Lost Moments (Dancing Girl Press), and At Last a Valley (Blue Jade Press). 

Joseph A Farina: in between

marbles were still moonstones

saved in a Crown Royal pouch

comics, adventures in a cardboard box

beneath your bed to read when you wanted 

magnets and magnifying glass

under summer sunshine 

trolling curbside refuse for treasure

long days of discovery walking

alley trails and marshes

secret paths behind old fence lines

where buried caches of our trove lay hidden

balancing on rusty railroad tracks

through backlots of foundries

far enough from home

you could boast being an explorer

close enough to run back if you had to

Joseph A Farina is a retired lawyer and award winning poet, and a pushcart nominee. His poems have appeared in Philadelphia Poets, Tower Poetry, The Windsor Review, and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century. He has three books of poetry published: The Cancer Chronicles, The Ghosts of Water Street and The beach, the street and everything in between.

Francine Witte: Without You

I drone through the day, bee-like, automatic.

The circuit of movement – alarm clock, cornflakes,

bus. Once on, I take a seat, and the man next to me

is lost in his phone, the sun through the window

placing its thumb on his dark meadow of hair.

I can’t help but notice that he is flower and musk,

and for a moment I wonder if he could be the next love

of my entire life. The love gurus on the internet warn

it will be like this for a while. Me, flitting near men,

led by that pull that keeps the species alive. Scientists

tell us that without bees to pollinate the food crops,

Humanity is doomed. And so, it’s only natural

that I am lured to this stranger and halfway in love.

It’s only natural for him to sit there, still and unaware,

all the while drenched in the pheromone of petals,

the stickiness of seed. Last night I dreamt you again.

This time I was the flower, dew-flecked and heart-crimson.

You had forgotten that you don’t love me anymore.

I woke up sudden and sweat-flecked, finally falling

back into uneven sleep. When I woke up hours

later, I thought about starting over, how life

is a garden full of beautiful blooms. And so here I am,

on a bus, next to a stranger who looks like my next forever.

But then, something catches me, and I look past him out

the window, some random street corner with honking cars,

or a swarm of school kids in front of a candy store.

Scientists say that honeybees die once they have stung

a victim. That’s because their stinger gets screwed in

so deep, they can’t pull it out. Of course, the honeybee

doesn’t know this, doesn’t know better. But I do, and so

I look at the man next to me and think that yes, he is lucky

to be so sweet and sting-able, but I’m not ready to die again

this soon. The bus pulls up to my stop – hisses, shrieks.

I step on to the street, take one last look at him

through the window. The bus starts up again,

rumbles, pulls away.  

Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is RADIO WATER (Roadside Press.) Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com.