Karen J. Weyant: Epiphany with Dead Carp

Two weeks before the tourist season starts,

the lake is suddenly crowded with dead carp.

A virus, experts say, as thousands of fish float

through the waves. Bloated bodies cling

to the banks, eyes bulge, slip from their sockets,

a thin film of pus and skin coats the surface.

Fins and gills and lily pads lap the shores,

turn shallow waters into graveyards.

Every morning the neighbor’s daughter,

a thin stick of a girl everyone said wasn’t quite right,

wades in, pushes pennies into the mouths

of the carp, thrusts them towards the undertow.

To pay the boatman, she says to anyone

who will listen. For weeks, I look for something

willing to ferry the dead. Sometimes I see

a blue heron looking lost in the thick water.

More often I spot river rats, eyes twitching, wise.

[Previously published in Lake Effect, 2010]

Karen J. Weyant's poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, Poetry East, Rattle and River Styx.  The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection, Avoiding the Rapture, was published by Riot in Your Throat Press last year. She lives, reads, and writes in northern Pennsylvania.

Mike McCormick: Depression

Lantern sputters

in a hollow hole

Eggless shells

groan and crack

The hungry fox

climbs the stair

Eyes shining

in the failing light

Micháel McCormick writes poetry in his Batman pyjamas. Mike's award winning work has appeared in over eighty journals and anthologies. Connect with Mike at @mikemccormickauthor on Facebook or his website www.mikemccormick.org.

 

James Sanders: continue as guest

 

James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group, a writing and performing collective. He was included in the 2016 BAX: Best American Experimental Writing anthology. His most recent book, Self-Portrait in Plants, was published in 2015. The University of New Orleans Press also recently published the group’s An Atlanta Poets Group Anthology: The Lattice Inside. http://somejamessanders.com

Shannon Frost Greenstein: I Really Miss the Hillary Step

It used to be that the Hillary Step was a Leviathan,

a Mecca,

something about which to dream;

a vertical face of solid rock –

juxtaposed against an altitude no human has ever been intended to inhabit – 

the Hillary Step was the most welcome sight

in all of the Death Zone.

It used to be a rite of passage.

It used to be that it would take two months of asceticism and misery

while occupying the least hospitable climate on Earth –

all of it endured to stand atop the ceiling of the planet

for the 120 seconds it takes fingers to start to freeze –

to successfully ascend Mount Everest;

the Hillary Step was the ultimate challenge

before the pure and inimitable rapture

of reaching the summit.

It used to be a reward. 

It used to be that conquering the Hillary Step

was synonymous with auspice; was synonymous with expertise.

The most renowned boots in all of mountaineering

each grappled with this ordeal of limestone and ice – 

the final obstacle before successfully having climbed

as high as anyone can possibly climb –

named after the first to stand upon the virgin snow

at the very top of the world.

It used to be that laymen stayed on the ground.

It used to be that scaling all 8849 metres –

that’s 29,032 feet for you Americans – 

required the most technical of skill;

only the truly elite could even fathom

ever having the privilege

to challenge life and death

upon the heights of the Himalayan range.

It used to be that there wasn’t a billionaire class.

It used to be that mountains in Nepal were pristine,

untouched,

unsullied by humanity,

like a moment lost and frozen in time;

71 years and 50,000 climbers later,

pollution and waste decorate the slopes of Mount Everest

while the glaciers shrink slowly away.

It used to be that the planet wasn’t melting.

It used to be that the native Sherpa

wouldn’t dare disrespect the mountain they called Chomolungma –

the “Mother Goddess of the World,”

a sacred playground for the Tibetan Gods –

by polluting her flanks with our painfully human foibles

just to get to the top.

It used to be nothing but poverty in Kathmandu, before Everest became a business. 

But things change,

and tectonic plates shift,

and crowds multiply,

and climates warm;

and what was once an accomplishment

is now simply a transaction

irrevocably disfiguring the sacred path to a summit

which the Buddhists warned us not to climb in the first place.

So now that it’s gone –

a victim of chaos theory

and our inevitable descent into entropy,

a relic to never again be joyfully vanquished

by future generations of high-altitude mountaineers –

I cannot help but mourn what once was,

because I really miss the Hillary Step.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. A former Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, her work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

Joan McNerney: Computer Game

I just click the awesome icon.

to discover words or match jewels.

Tiles slow...a beaming box of eye candy

to pick and nibble as my score  grows.

All the petty slogs and limps of 

this withered day are beaten back.

I love my snazzy game name and avatar.

My world sits inside this small square.

I am winning.

Joan McNerney’s poetry is published worldwide in over thirty-five countries in numerous literary magazines. Four Best of the Net nominations have been awarded to her. The Muse in Miniature, Love Poems for Michael, and At Work are available on Amazon.com. A new title Light & Shadows has recently been released.

Andrea Maxine Recto: The Corners of Your Love

They say everyone has edges,

points where tolerances end.

But not you.

Until the day you died,

you were an open field

I wandered endlessly.

Your absence is a labyrinth;

I’m crying at all the dead ends, 

wishing I’d find you in the corners instead. 

Andrea Maxine Recto is a Spanish-Filipino poet living in Manila. Her work has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, the Santa Clara Review, and the Red Eft Review, with more forthcoming in Rust & Moth, the Long River Review, and elsewhere.  

Roisín Browne: Ballerina

after Anastasiia Kerdina

Evacuation apartment

shattered mothers shout

windows mocked in dust

a little girl takes her first finger

draws ballerinas on forlorn glass

makes them dance on light

Roisín Browne’s work has appeared in Black Nore Review, Poetry NI, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, Ragaire Literary Magazine and Mnemotope. She was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2018, shortlisted in the 2019 Bangor Literary festival and highly commended in the Seán Dunne Inaugural Poetry Award 2024.

Miriam O'Neal: Lindens

There were linden trees in Kyiv

like the linden tree beside my driveway

where honey bees brizzz through June,

ignoring every other bloom for that luscious drip.

Once, in Padua, the lindens almost broke me

their fragrance dense and sweet as heartbreak

through the open doors—my last lover a thousand

miles away and Padua’s heat daring me to breathe.

Are there still linden trees in Kyiv?

Unable to flee, have they pushed deeper—-searching

out their siblings’ tendrilled roots in the soil of parks and graveyards?

Does their perfume re-saturate the air each time the smoke clears?

Basket bark, wood lathed into cabinets, creamy blossoms dried and steeped

to break the fever—they give and give. I read that lindens sometimes live a thousand years,

their broad limbs sprawled across the sky, their only predator the war-

makers who bomb every   living   thing.        As if that means they win.

Miriam O’Neal’s newest collection is The Half-Said Things  (Nixes Mate, 2022). She is Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. She has published in The Waxed Lemon, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. New work will appear in Lily Poetry Review soon. She hosts the longest running reading series south of Boston.

Peter Adair: Mr Casey

sways over me in the doorway. Come in, little man, come in, 

he says, and tousles my hair.  The sun licks his stubbly face,

music slithers from a room.  When I hold out the letter – 

dropped through the wrong box – his sweaty hand grabs it,

he stumbles on the doorstep, his face glows like a red sky,

darkens as he rips up the letter and flicks away that bloody bill

and stoops and looks at me and wants to be my friend.

His quick breaths stink.  We both are still. 

Then I run down the steps and run down the empty street,

and still I am running away and still I am running away.

Peter Adair's poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, New Isles Press and many other journals.  An e-pamphlet, Calling Card, is available from Amazon.  He is the recipient of a NI Arts Council bursary for 2024.

Brian Beatty: What You Don’t Know

The coin-operated horse

out front of K-mart

had no idea

merry-go-rounds existed.

Or traveling carnivals, 

for that matter.

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Dark Mountain, Evergreen Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Quarterly, Rattle, Seventeen and The Southern Review.