July & August 2020
Vol V No IV
Not your ordinary poetry magazine!
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Published bi-monthly
Experimental & Form Poetry with editor Joseph E. Petta
On Reading in an Aquarium
sheltered corner
(stone)
comfortable darkness
(can’t conceal my red sneakers)
so close to —
(life)
flickering, colors of wet skin, slow-waving, unblinking eyes,
pale versus glimmering,
emotionless mouths, here there everywhere, unconcerned
dance of the deep
fish.
reading
friend wrote this
(warm pride)
hopefully I’m not bothering anyone by sitting on the floor
I’m pretty sure the fish don’t mind.
mixture of feelings
cool, quiet, steady
motion, excitement, gratitude
(hello, my circumstances)
a silver —
bubble?
— like an unexpected star —
breaks free
and rises, rises, rises
Maura Atwood is a theater teacher, actor, and poet currently living in Milwaukee. Her work has been published in Centrique Magazine, Artifact Nouveau, and Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters.
Homage to a Forgotten Form
Day dims into night
Night pales into unknown day
Has anything changed?
All appears as it had been
But yesterday is foreign
And tomorrow alien.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty-odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He has published over two hundred fifty stories and poems, and five books. Ed sits on the review board of Bewildering Stories where he also manages several review editors.
Widely Inside
Kansas beyonds me
With fields well above my crows
Across skies that become my long-ago futures
those never-returned echoing caws
And so widely inside
Kansas speaks past me
its very air
Through those screen doors that haunt
Their lunging ways
rusted with going
Kansas my brother
Your pancakes of sunrise
like a feast of too far —
You worry my outwards
burrowing deep into whatever
oldens me more
Hiram Larew’s fourth collection of poems, Undone, was issued in 2018 by FootHills Publishing. Find more of his work on Facebook at Hiram Larew, Poet and at PoetryXHunger.com.
Control
From the leper colony she sent her letter
Don’t you dare come near me again
Asked for an application for a restraining order
Against those who let her go
And said goodbye forever
​
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When is Wisdom is When
I asked her what she regretted
She said nothing and — happily looked around
I asked her again a month later
It was basketball, she should’ve played basketball
Never started with soccer
no matter how much she loved it
And studied art, not business
And been left-handed, not right
And been Spanish, not American.
And born now, not then.
Born later, never, not in August, at least.
Then kissed my forehead and rose.
Natalia Rainier Sloan was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She is 1/3 of the women-owned-and-operated music school in the suburbs of her home city, and 1/1 of the writer of these poems.
Untitled
(or, I suppose when you mention it like that, we could have made different decisions)
​
​
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C. M. Preston is a Canadian poet currently attending the MFA program at The University of British Columbia.
all the salt #31
the wind picks up the putting out presses the stones into the faces that once believed they had enough stones makes sport-coats out twisters brings us another person on the floor of this earth so that we can sink past the tables of gods those folks that sit up straight when they eat they eat without looking at their full plates while the rest of us count our peas while we eat our peas while the wind brings us silt for our new scars the tray is the tray the whole world is a biography of the army growing sad but never growing sad enough to put down their arms
all the salt #32
i press hard to find the small ghosts of my time in the blue but all they show me is more blue all i wanted was more blue anyway so i keep poking through the rain like there might be a chest somewhere that i can challenge with this reality
all the salt #33
do not let the idea of god give you even more possibilities you are for the living or you are betting on the dead there is no other war
Darren C. Demaree is the author of fourteen poetry collections, most recently Unfinished Murder Ballads. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.