Carlee Klipsun: Natural Disaster

I like these natural disasters,

the damage turns us into a 

gasping symphony, the largest 

choir of bodies at half-mast.

When we’re all mirrors, 

I feel whole again, 

feel myself sitting in the wooden pew 

with you beside me, our hands clasped

around remote controls, 

our faces lit up by identical 

images at identical times. 

Without speaking, we recite

the same psalm of 

dread and worry. When

the flames lick up every inch

of Hollywood like candy,

we enter an ancient feeling,

a collective holiness, 

our divisions null and void

until tomorrow.

Carlee Klipsun is a disabled writer and artist from the Pacific Northwest now living in rural Georgia. Her previous written work has been published by Muse-Pie Press’ Shot Glass Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, and the Confluence Project’s Voices of the River. Carlee spends her free time feeding raccoons and volunteering for her tribe, the Chinook Indian Nation.

Mary Paterson: I won’t believe

in your love until it can be measured, quantitatively,

for example in diamonds, rainfall, or cortisol levels

collected over a five year period. The control group

is people who have never been loved. They walk among us - 

owning pencils, twirling the ends of their hair

round their loveless fingers. How can I tell if, really, 

you belong to their alarming number? You may 

have misunderstood every love song. 

You may be crying at the wrong segments of my life. 

You could be concocted entirely of man-made materials:

plastics, apologies, genocides. Man-made 

concoctions do not love. Ergo love is not made, only felt, 

like the weather. But the weather stopped 

loving us a lifetime ago (according to the data). 

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London. Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Cutbow Quarterly.  Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Margaret Galvin: The Work of Her Hands

We knew her by her hands,

death had done its damnest with every other feature,

collapsed her face to caricature, plastered the hair to her skull.

The hands assured us, carried the familiar toil,

her sprong in the soil, the basin of Kerr Pinks at her hip,

worms and clay in the water,

the way she ran a darning needle under her nails

to dislodge the black dense clog.

We remembered shrivelled finger pads, hands too long in the bath pan

shampoo lathered through our hair,

the fire lit, as red and fair heads bent to the drying spark,

the chaffed palms on wash days: the gouge and ire of harsh detergent.

Hands that heaved furniture to hide the shabby

lino, its pockmarks burnished with lavender polish,

hands that brought the relief of a cigarette to her mouth to calm

the throb of burst fingers, spurting blood.

Her work with scissors, saucepan and shovel, over now,

the stitch, the sift, the shine all evidenced

in her mortuary chapel hands,

waxy hands crossed in improbable repose.

Margaret Galvin writes poetry and prose essays. She lives in Wexford, Ireland. Hre most recent collection is 'Our Hose, Delirious' from Revival Press, Limerick. Her essays are frequently broadcast on national radio in Ireland: RTE Radio 1 on 'Sunday Miscellany' and 'A Word in Edgeways.

Enda Boyle: Baristas Always Break Your Heart

Dragged through the ivory gates into a heavy jacket October morning

sleep-eyed and semi-sentient I Karloff shamble into the city centre.

Once again, I have been called to the bar, the artisanal coffee bar.

Great Victoria Street’s last sanctuary for leisure and contemplation,

among the touchscreen take away assembly line chain stores.

Sacred as morning payer this ritual of ground beans and daydreaming,

before endless cups of instant and the purgatory of emails, emails, emails.

At the counter the barista has already prepared my medium Americano.

We exchange angel-light banalities of the kind I would normally despise

for she has the flash of wit strong enough to draw humour from the greyest man

and her smile is a charm to vanquish the gloom of a Monday in Autumn.

Paying for the coffee (with tip) a flock of fantasies take flight in my head,

does she read? Can she play guitar? Will she listen to my poems with tolerance?

Stirring the milk into my drink I notice care and grace with which she blesses every order,

a small cappuccino for her, double espresso for him, six hot chocolates for the schoolkids.

As much as coffee making this is her art, she came to work especially to see you and her

and him, she pours specialness into every cup, severs every drink with a side of friendliness,

loyal to every loyalty card holder she is everyone’s closest confidant for a single transaction.

The ‘personal touch’ can feel cold as snowman’s handshake when it is not sincere.

Your landlord may rob you; your boss can ruin your day, but baristas always break your heart.

Enda Boyle was born in Derry in 1994. He was educated at Ulster University and Queen's University Belfast. He currently lives in Belfast and works an office job. In 2023 he published the Back Room Poetry chapbook Love Songs of The Precariously Employed.

James Kangas: Magnetic Field

In a Chicago bar, in my 20s, I learned

to prop myself up for half the night, nurse

two drinks maybe, stare at anyone I thought

I might love, leave, if lucky, with an evening

star for the Farwell Beach playground, say,

for a little--communion. We might seesaw,

swing, stick our feet in the water, go round

and round the simple carousel (hinging,

of course, on his playfulness) till the sun

rose over the lake like a ruddy lover, Somehow,

looking back, that part seems the best. I was

always hungry, he seemed, always, beautiful.

Then, when finally our hopeful bodies

begged us for deliverance, I’d sometimes push

to exchange the next move for a number,

which, if I dialled it later, might bring

back that magic ache (the ache

of two magnets held a bare millimetre apart),

denial the weird force holding us

in a kind of union.

[Originally published in Wilde Magazine Issue 1, Winter 2012]

James Kangas is a retired librarian living in Flint, Michigan. His work has been published in Adroit Journal, Free State Review, New World Writing, Tampa Review, West Branch, et al. His chapbook, Breath of Eden (Sibling Rivalry Press), was published in 2019.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella: Pour

The pot boils canned soup—

peeled label fraying,

plucked from a sidewalk cabinet

two years expired.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in West Philadelphia. She edits HOOT Review, and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Thirst and Frost (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and other collections. 

Brian Palmu: Rogue Butterwort

There they go, Ashley and Tad,

the hiking group’s organizers

pressing impatiently up

the path, striking saxifrage

and vetch with artisanal

switches as we lag behind.

Tad stops, bends by an outcrop,

buffaloed by an unknown

species, its platypus beak’s

greasy green leaves clustered under

a single purple flower

floating, an in memoriam

for dead ants on a battlefield.

He sticks a pinkie in the heart

of the plant’s velcro gob which

munches Tad’s digit up to

the second knuckle, both leaders

open-mouthed in disbelief.

The other hikers relax,

bemused, as Rhonda pretends

to fumble through her backpack

for a first-aid kit while Tad,

blood spilling in red slashes

across the adhesive plates,

beseeches all of us face

by face, then wincing, carries

his hand like a transplanted heart.

Brian Palmu is a poet and critic currently living in Victoria, B.C., Canada. His two chapbooks are Sunset Mathematics (Frog Hollow Press, 2017) and Parade (Anstruther Press, 2024).

Gifford Savage: Cold Comfort

He stands front of City Hall

framed by shimmering Christmas lights.

Florid face set hard as flint

finger-pointing, fist-pumping,

spewing fire-and-brimstone fury.

MAGA hat incongruous on the Belfast street.

Judgement cast like stones:

YOU’RE A SINNER,

YOU’RE ON THE ROAD TO HELL!

Lusting for an argument, for confrontation.

Shoppers quicken pace, hurry past.

PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.

But what kind of God, I wonder, 

is this angry man expecting,

and where is he to be found?

Roiling vitriol pours across the road,

brings no solace to the huddled figure

blanketed against December’s bite.

Pleading eyes hope for a spare coin,

anxious faces rush by, avert their eyes,

clutching wrapped gifts of perfume and gold.

In the distance a children’s choir is singing,

lilting voices lightly drifting down,

familiar lyrics falling soft as snow,

crushed underfoot on crowded pavements:

with the poor and meek and lowly,

                  lived on earth our Saviour holy.

Gifford Savage is from Bangor and is a Diocesan Lay Reader in the Church of Ireland. His poetry has appeared in a number of journals including Honest Ulsterman, The Storms, Flight of the Dragonfly, The Bangor Literary Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Agape Review and The New Verse News.

Catherine Arra: Love Poem

Summer to autumn, leaves pirouette, 

lissome and limber, garnish green in harvest gold.

Deer brindle to blend in forest dusk,

sun sets with longer arms to reach shorter days.

A first snow pantomimes the story of our year, covers

tired roots tucked deep for sleep in burnt umber.

You come to me this late-November morning, cover

me with your lissome-limbs,

tributaries to a core root.

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com

Mary Howlett: Teacher Training College

(circa 1974)

My father drops me at the side gate in his navy,

beat up Ford Anglia. I’ll leave you here so…

I wait until the car rounds the bend,

smoke billowing from the exhaust,

smell of Sweet Afton on my coat.

I’m glad the other students are not around

to see my hand me downs, worn shoes,

polished to within an inch of their lives.

The battered mustard suitcase makes me stand out.

Assigned a cubicle at the back wall of the dormitory,

a sort of consolation prize, punishment for daring to be here.

I pull across the curtain, wash myself in the enamel basin

with cold water, cry myself to sleep.

The Dublin girls with loud, put-on accents,

I avoid them, they seem to be everywhere.

They ask me where I’m from, I invent a posh address

in Cork city. The male students parade around

the corridors strutting their stuff, young peacocks,

puffing out their chests, making shapes. I avoid them too.

Sister Bernadette, my art teacher, takes a shine to me,

sure there’s nothing wrong in being from Cork, she giggles.

We sit most evenings in the quiet refectory, we talk about Cork things,

how to mix colours, find the right hues, how to make macramé wall hangings.

Her brown habit a burden on her small frame.

She whispers that she once loved a man, he is in her thoughts

every night as she kneels by her bed above the Sanctuary.         

Mary Howlett is a poet and artist, her art has been published in The Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light Press and the Bangor Literary Journal. Her poetry can be found in literary journals including Wexford Women Writing Undercover, Poetry As Commemoration UCD, The Ireland Collection UK, and elsewhere