Issue #30.1 Three Poems by Harold Bowes
Photo with Text Message
K,
We saw this driving in town today, on the porch of an older restored house. The house has new owners, and they’ve hung some living room art on their front porch facing out to the street: see, a snow-covered house in a country landscape.
My first reaction was that they are genuine art lovers, and in love with their new home, and just need to be schooled in the finer skills of art appreciation. I turned to M and suggested we should offer our services as art appreciators to them. We could be their tutors, I said. Suggest track lighting.
Then I had another thought. Maybe it’s a new trend, placing inexpensive art on your home’s exterior.
I don’t know if you saw this where you live, though I bet you did when you lived in Spokane: the five point metal stars that became popular as outdoor art in rural areas about 25 years ago. You still see them sometimes.
There is a desperate impulse. There is an aching need for art.
H
Office Inventory
The diameter of a coin the width of its stand Was it four inches?
My friendship with Jay spanned four years
People ask me about Jay’s award because it’s small and human not large and formal like the certificates on the wall
There is an entry point I can tell the story about the coin, where it came from why it’s on this stand
There’s a literal human face
He made the stand by hand
Because he was very intelligent Jay could see the little things that made up the whole
The importance of each component without which the larger whole wouldn’t exist
On a trip to my hometown standing on the bank of the river there a half dollar coin in my hand I realized I had run out of time
What did Jay say sometimes? “Out of the indefinite, the definite”
“The Same Rules for the Ox as for the Lion Is Oppression “
We drove to the luau in a Plymouth sedan the size of an F250. The Plymouth was the sexy version of a Dodge.
I’m traveling with my mother and brothers. Mother and brother are both the “other.”
Father was recently dead. “ather” doesn’t mean anything.
The fronds on the palm trees were eye level from the second story balcony at the hotel.
There was tea in the hotel room. Tea is tree without the “r”.
Tea with an “r” is tear.
Mother’s niece had married an army captain stationed in Oahu.
My brothers and I had grown our hair long.
Mother’s niece explained about the Hulu dancers, that they may call you on stage to dance with them,
“but don’t worry.”
I worry the whole time and I’ve never stopped.
Decades go by.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017). Harold’s poems have appeared in elimae, THRUSH Poetry Journal, alice blue, SOFTBLOW, Portland Review, DMQ Review, failbetter, and many others.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.2 A Triple Issue: Jon Raimon, Bradley K Meyer, Andrey Gritsman
A Poem by Jon Raimon
-rising-
tidy eggs & faux too green grass. one more plastic basket in a world littered with drek. she meant well, my mom, each
Easter. which I capitalize here in her honor, in her dis- grace, as she died and as she
lived. glamorous drunk, it is a thing my mom was, esp- ecially on holidays where dazzle and
glitter, rebirth and miracles, diamonds and chunky neck- lasses rule the moment, our hopes:
it all passes on, with egg hunts gone wrong. kent cigarette butts and cute glass pint gin bottles dug
up in the yard be- side the pre-fab eggs filled with cheap chocolate and blood money.
and that last egg, unearthed be- hind the playhouse where your big brother shoots up, rebirths him-
self til he’s van- ished; wee you finds it, that egg, months later. it’s odd. a near dead blue,
drained by the spring rain, the summer’s rioting sunblast. when you open it, there it is,
tucked tight, fetus like,
right beneath a traumatized
slug in her dazzling golden ooze: Love.
just plain old love. who the hell knew?
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jon Raimon teaches writing in Ithaca, NY. His work explores grief, family, resistance, and all forms of love. He is part of Spring Writes, Ithaca’s literary festival, and his work appeared in Haikuniverse, Quasar Review, Adirondack Center for Writing, Wilderness, and will soon be featured in The Turning Leaf, Book of Matches, Merganser Magazine, and The Bluebird Word. His inspirations include the creek down the road, his children and students, and all kinds of rocks.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Bradley K Meyer
The Seasons
‘What the fuck are perfect places?’ -Lorde
In Paris, out of the corner of my eye, I watch two teenagers make out on the train. I get out to drink alone on the Seine. I think about the violinist who was robbed here twice in one week. I can’t tell what’s in the river, but a bird dives for it. I order a sandwich from a food cart and do this in French. The seller shakes his head, ‘Don’t... don’t do that. Just speak English with me.’ I admit to feelings of persecution. Unhappiness is so obviously a stronger emotion than happiness. Some people say that some people feel that in this particular city. Louise says the world is complete without us. Litter amongst litter. Sad, intolerable fact. Lauren says of another Lauren, ‘I love her because she’s my friend, but she is not an artist. She took one photography class, maybe two and now she has gallery shows.’ I finish most of my sandwich. I am probably not the form of superfluous I choose for myself either. A yacht churns. A cloud and some buildings reflect in its glass. If the sky here is not aware of me, the insects are. I paint them sky blue with a brush. I have lowered the sky. Someone throws a bottle into the river. The current does not even have a bird to pull along on its string. Calling this ‘Being and Nothingness’ would be too on the nose. I throw some bread in the river. Someone will want it eventually.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Bradley K Meyer writes from Tbilisi, Georgia. Recent work has appeared in Biscuit Hill, BRUISER, Muleskinner and Right Hand Pointing. He teaches English.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Andrey Gritsman
SILENCE
Silence is a grateful state of the soul. When you can hear grass growing, deep underground rivers flowing to the precipice, cats conversing about us, watching our irreconcilable deficiencies. Your voice from the past is calling me, explaining what happened and what could have happened. And I just welcome this silence with open arms, all ears, still yearning for this last word, hoping it's not the last.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Andrey Gritsman came to the US from Russia in 1981. He is a physician, poet and essayist, writes in two languages. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times and shortlisted for PSA Poetry Prize. Poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in more than ninety journals including New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, and Denver Quarterly, anthologized and translated into several European languages. He authored fifteen books of poetry and prose in both languages. He edits international poetry magazine Interpoezia (www.interpoezia.org) . Previous collections from Cervena Barva Press: Live Lanscape and Family Chronicles. New poetry collection Crossing the Line is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.3 Three Poems by Bill Lavender
Photograph by Louis Maistros
from: city of god, poems based on a distracted* reading of a dubious translation** of De civitate Dei contra paganos, commonly known in English as The City of God by Saint Augustine of Hippo.
*by life and media in the USA, beginning January 6, 2021, the day of the Trump insurrection, ending January 6, 2025, the day of his election certification.
**Marcus Dods editor/translator, 1872 edition, Gutenberg Ebook #45304.
These poems are excerpted from the complete responses to the Augustine text, 400 some odd pieces, which will be released by MadHat Press in 2026.
20.17
our saint finds it “excessively barefaced” (inpudentiae nimiae) to read the apocalypse literally, like our own impudent oil execs buying up wind leases just so they can lie fallow while it rains fire, ‘climate talks’ in nice hotels yield barefaced good wishes, wheat crops cook in the ground & trump’s barefaced mugshot hits every front page, and the worst is yet to come
20.27
“such a judgment as has never before been,” a vision augustine shares with clarence thomas who lies awake at night itching to sink his pen into anything that smacks of ‘right to privacy’ (though just try to sneak a camera on one of those yachts) for it is just those privy moments we need to be punished for
20.28
& regardless of all the cruelly inequitable sentences handed down in the course of history by judges both human and divine showering honor glory wealth and offspring upon liars thieves and murderers and poverty prison and sorrow without bound upon the most saintly and selfless among us the “last” judgment shall be the perfect pairing of every mortal (living or not) with the just punishment and/or eternally blessed sensual massage everything so equitable there will be no need to ever judge anything again
________________________________________________________________________________________
Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. His twelfth book of poetry and magnum opus, city of god, appears from MadHat Press in 2026. My ID was published by BlazeVOX in October, 2019. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, (comprised of Q, Little A, and The Private I) was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, was published by Black Widow in 2011. Essays, fiction, poetry and other ephemera appear regularly in Xavier Review, Fell Swoop, Southern Review, Jacket2 and other print and online journals.
Bill is the founder of Lavender Ink/Diálogos and co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.4 A Triple Issue: Vivian Faith Prescott, LC Gutierrez, Richard LeDue
A Poem by Vivian Faith Prescott
Escapement Goals for Flannel Shirt Girls
The number of adult salmon that return to the rivers to spawn is called “escapement.” They’ve escaped predators—fishermen, sealions and killer whales. How escapement is measured in us island girls, though, is by how many jobs we have, where we’re hiding money, like the bills I hid in my Chinese puzzle box. We’re not taught to escape predators or even what they look like. We only know wolves stalking deer, brown bear boars ripping apart cubs. Those young women whose parents own tug and barge companies, or are schoolteachers, escape better. Not so much the girls from the families of loggers or fishermen or sawmill workers. Do they live in public housing or the trailer court? What are their escapement goals? There’s no college on our island. They all have ferry tickets to nowhere. My brother joins the army and disappears for a couple decades. My older sister gets teen-married, I get teen-married, my younger sister gets teen-married. We escape to the cascading falls we cannot jump.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska where she still lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. She is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She mentors Alaskan writers in two writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and the Drumlin Poets. She’s the author of several full-length poetry collections, a short story collection, and a foodoir.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by LC Gutierrez
Through the Smoke
i.
I packed myself to college, and when I emptied bags felt nothing
but the weight of it, like a cowbell trolling me back to blood- thinned doubt.
The pleat of plaid skirts weren’t for me, so I whacked off in a heavy-sweatered crouch.
Failure smells of rank incense and skunk weed. It lays awake
when you don’t want to be: unreadied and unreleased.
ii.
There is only space and nothing. I would fill it with the mud of thick-toed discontent.
The black light fuzz has taken me again like a cancer.
You say I’m a prince in rags, but when I dare look up the room is a hollow
the learned ones have picked through and walked away.
iii.
We don’t choose family, but this sinking version of myself was mine to take
and know they wouldn’t see me for the smoke or come a-rooting like wet-snouted truffle hogs
to find me where I’d flapped my wings to thud.
iv.
I took “The Matrix” for its philosophical crux and swallowed every sweaty pill that I was handed.
Head buried between the legs of strange bedfellows, and now I’m feeling hollow-puked inside out.
Shall I name this place of blind iteration, and know you’ll never see me here again?
________________________________________________________________________________________
LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean. He currently lives, writes, teaches, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work has been published or forthcoming in a number of wonderful journals, such as: Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, Hobart, Tampa Review, Trampset and Trampoline Journal. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Richard LeDue
“Reshelving the Dead”
I worked in the university library when I was a student. All the poetry books were together and the shelves there were as dusty as the old philosophy books that seemed to mock me for thinking about minoring in philosophy.
It was during this time I developed my allergy to dust, which seems an appropriate response to seeing all those great texts still as tombstones people pass by while looking for someone they know.
I wish I could say I discovered something interesting then, like how paper cuts were really dead writers haunting potential readers, but I mainly learned about minimum wage not being enough and how easy it is to whisper.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.5 A Triple Issue: Clint Margrave, J.R. Solonche, Jade Kleiner
A Poem by Clint Margrave
Keats’s Death Mask
My students complain that we focus too much on death in this class, that all the poets we study are obsessed with it,
so when I tell them I saw a copy of Keats’s death mask up for sale at Christie’s and joke, “Does anyone know if Christie’s takes credit cards?”
they don’t laugh and aren’t impressed, and just want to know what I’d do with it if I had the money.
I tell them I might pass it around at the next dinner party, or tie a string on it and wear it for Halloween or maybe just bring it to class and set it on this desk so we can all stare at it while discussing “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 200 years after Keats died at their age.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Clint Margrave is the author of several books, including the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by J.R. Solonche
My Life
When I was young, I was told many things. One thing I was told was not to stare at the sun.
If I did, I would go blind. I was not foolish.
I did not. Another thing was not to stare at the full moon through my bedroom window.
If I did, the moon would slice my life in half. I was foolish.
I did. And it did.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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 more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Jade Kleiner
After Stealing Another Poet’s Notebook
I stole your notebook. I did not do this to rob you I did it to enrich myself I have meticulously scanned edited and submitted the upper most marketable 22% of the syllables you scribbled in Q-4, twenty twenty four.
I saw you writing in your notebook, I have no need for more, I am in good health and I have health insurance this year.
So I have your notebook.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jade Kleiner is a writer and poet from New England. Her poetry can be found in manywor(l)ds, Neologism Poetry Journal, New Note Poetry, and elsewhere. Her fiction is upcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review. She is transgender and has practiced in the Plum Village tradition since 2020.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.6 A Triple Issue: Jim Daniels, Jason Davidson, Bebe Cullen
A Poem by Jim Daniels
Sleeping on the Floor of my Office After a Fight
was like giving my own self a timeout to pout in the corner while she slept drunk and comfy
in the bed back home. I wanted to call her on the office phone. to remind her I’d run away
and was going to stay in my office until she apologized. It makes me laugh even now
forty years later, finding the xeroxes of my face I made that night
squeaking WANTED in permanent marker across the top of the page.
We broke up over the phone. Her office just down the hall from mine. But she never slept there.
Breaking up was like making a xerox of your face. Blinding light searing eyeballs, hair
flattened into insanity. Permanent marker invisible forever.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jim Daniels’ Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Michigan State University Press. His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, was published in 2025, and his latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, was published in 2023. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Jason Davidson
A Chest, A Home
the seawall, the sand-castles, the slaughter-house. my crushed courage, your belated brave. on the death-line, an old woman with ink beneath her fingertips coos brightly. sweat drains from her slip-knot like the sea remembers, but she takes each of their tongues to task. the sea always remembers. do you remember the sea, little comma? wildfire broke out upon the open water and we cherished our claustrophobia. we were no one. we were good bones. we broke open only momentarily and kept our pockets filled with stones. lonesome stones. stones painted with their faces. hello, little brother. hello, little sister. that terrible spring, you emptied your pockets and floated into the air. a rendering. a shift-change. old mother dark-star caught you staring and carried you away, into the night. come home, little comma. my chest opens like a puzzle, surrounded by your moat. come home.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer and theatre-maker. He's written, directed and produced over two hundred works of experiential theatre. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Unbroken, Cathexis North, Quibble and is forthcoming in Rawhead and others. When he isn't traveling, he lives on California's Central Coast with his husband and small brood of four-legged children. He's slowly finishing his first novel and a new full-length collection of poetry.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Bebe Cullen
I Let It Enfold Me
Said I loved fashion, said This is where I find the combs and This is where I find the cigarette packs. This is my favorite boy because he always picks up his newspaper At the same time every day. 2:54, right off the bus. Cried lots of times a day At trumpets and thunder and strawberries And how you’d lean over the chair and How they were eating. They ate so fast. I took a lot of showers And let the water boil and pour Over my shoulders and down my spine And it hit my achilles heel and felt like a blanket or blood.
Summer came with tractors and Feet dirty from unswept floors. My thighs touched. My skin cleared. My hair grew and Knotted and Waved. It’s been a month since I said You were beautiful And funny And so so smart And you said I’m sorry And I didn’t stay To hear why.
I let ants bite me because That’s how you make friends. Let sweat build up on the Back of my neck, Wouldn’t wipe it off. Let my leg hair grow, Let my mailbox fill up, Let my window stay open, All week long. “Silver Springs” Over and over Except I didn’t run for you.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Bebe Cullen is a high school sophomore from Falmouth, Maine. Although she runs her school’s online magazine, this is her first real publication, and she is so, so excited. She’s her community’s cult classic and is often called a “piece of work.” She’s ready to see where she can go next. Her favorite word is precocious, just so you know.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Issue #30.7 A Triple Issue: Steve Lambert, Chenyue Wang, John Grey
A Poem by Steve Lambert
Souvenir
Edinburgh, West End
Up at 2:30 after a piss, I grab my phone and go out to the living room couch, check email, Scroll X, BlueSky, Facebook. Nothing. I Walk the unfamiliar living room, look closer at things, trying not to wake Keri, every move I make Tai-chi. Everyone we know is far away and sleeping. I can’t read. Twilight comes early here. Wide awake and far from home, windows open and chilly June whisping in the burnt smell of billions of roasting coffee beans. Chilly in June. I go and part the drapes, see a small, pale figure across the street, in the gray morning, like a child playing hide and seek, squatting against the back wall of The Caledonian Hotel. Not a ghost or girl, actually, but a young woman, early twenties, having a wee, a black ribbon of a man swaying guard next to her in the gloaming. They don’t see me—or pretend not to—and I watch until they swerve out of view. Don’t ask too much of what you see, I think. Sometimes, ask nothing.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana but grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Saw Palm, Trampoline Poetry, Chiron Review, The Pinch, Northampton Poetry Review (UK), Broad River Review, Longleaf Review, Emrys Journal, Bull Fiction, Into the Void, Cowboy Jamboree, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2015 he won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and in 2018 he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations and was a Rash Award in Fiction finalist. He is the author of the poetry collections Heat Seekers (CW Books, 2017) and The Shamble (CW Books, 2020), the book-length poem Dutch Ears (2025), and the fiction collection The Patron Saint of Birds (Cowboy Jamboree, 2020). He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches at the University of North Florida.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by Chenyue Wang
Swallow
I walk between dorm & library, piled leaves crunching to pulp. It’s the only sound small enough
to accompany me through a New England winter. Years ago, in the warm breath of December, white smoke rose in my home, steaming
the kitchen windows over the pot. Somewhere, my father still presses his squat palm into this memory like dough itself–
kneading on our pastry board, before he passes it to me. My fingers are clumsy, but human enough to remember, even
through waves of time, through oceans crossed, how to keep the dough warm as breath. As bubbles churning in the pot, threatening
to overflow—Mandarin words I can’t quite recall simmer across the window’s humid blur, moisture
covering the strokes along the sill. Once ready, I always watched the dumplings cooling down, their skin shrinking, vanishing into
translucence. Pink pork & shrimp, black wood ear, green Napa cabbage always daring to spill out. (They never did.)
But today, in this cold gray space, leaves translate to ground before I’m even awake. I chew
a crumbly ham sandwich to its edges. Soggy and homesick I swallow. I swallow again, even black tea
too bitter to wash it down.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Chenyue Wang is a writer from Beijing, China. She is currently a high school student in Connecticut. In addition to poetry, she enjoys writing short stories in her free time. Her work often explores memory and cross-cultural identity.
________________________________________________________________________________________
A Poem by John Grey
The Season of Ghost Horses
Lonely, the evergreens stand sentinel, Berries ripen, dreams too – though neither are much good once the sun’s gone feral.
Hell’s coastline stretches on, a jagged hymn of rock and salt, purple sea streaked like bruises on the body of the world. Islands jut up, fists raised, angry at nothing in particular.
We descended – not so much fell as tore through a thin skin between thought and indulgence. Sex was a currency, spent in the underworld of mind where memory forgets to keep records.
Through the fogged-up windscreen, they’re horses, gray, shrunken, ghosts of something once wild. He had a rubbery face, flushed with the kind of generosity that forgets to ask questions. Not as rare as he reckoned, but seldom alone long enough to know how lonely he was.
My thoughts - those old, unsaid things from years before - came back like birds without their songs, roosting in the nests of memory. One stroke, and the years between were gone.
His poems were vivid, so much so he mistook them for the world itself. The devil, of course, never left - just changed zip codes.
Dreams, forgotten by morning, return like stray dogs sniffing at the back door. The artwork reminded me of those shapes that dance on the retina before sleep takes hold.
I face the world face down – not in defeat, just in defiance. Some things are too good to miss, yet too fast to catch. And I’ve stopped chasing.
________________________________________________________________________________________
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Flights.
________________________________________________________________________________________