It’s her fault

by John Steffen

Because of the moon
Wife and I got in a fight when
I dragged her outside to see the light tonight
Because of the moon

The light of night is not her interest, she said
And I am just a fool, by her insistence and spite

Because of the moon
The neighbor’s dog barked at me
I meander like a sheep lost in my own back yard
Because of the moon

Because of the moon
A brilliant light, a bitter wife
A barking dog, a sparkling night
Words written born out of light
Because of the moon
It’s her fault

 
###
John Steffen is a retired fundraiser and of late a student of fiction and poetry at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Although unpublished save an article or two some decades ago, and a recent story on http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/  he is now in the process of recreating himself for the 60th time with the dream of publishing a book of memoirs.  Website Links:   http://ofdogsandotherobservations.blogspot.com/\

Fourteen

by Morgan Rae Glazier

 
During a Sunday drive,
our mother stopped our white Dodge Spirit
at the base of the Harrisville hills.
She snatched a chisel and hammer,
from the Spirit’s storage,
and said, wait here girls.

For thirty minutes,
my sister and I
stared out the car window,
our mother carving her and her boyfriend’s
initials into a heart-shaped stump
on the side
of US-23 South. 

This was the closest my mother
would come to prayer

###
Morgan Rae Glazier has a Bachelor of Science from Central Michigan University, and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Student Affairs. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and is quite fond of laughing out loud as often as possible.

echoes of love

by Earl Moore

the spring garden                                                                         
passionate love poem                                                                 
softly echoes                                                                               
my longing for you                                                                     
but now emptiness                                                                       

butterfly                                                                                       
the garden bench                                                                         
Monarch                                                                                       
floating softly to my arm                                                             
tender as your soft touch                                                             

southern grass                                                                             
soft morning fog                                                                           
lightly moves                                                                               
as your fresh body                                                                         
at the movie last night                                                                   

white dove                                                                                     
lands a few feet away                                                                   
picnic basket                                                                                 
sudden echoes in a lost past                                                                     
with marriage vows to last

Lunch Break, Kansas

by Devin Harrison

The children dip midday under broad-armed elms
by the edge of the lake cup their hands in water
send schools of marbled green glass minnows
shuttering through the shallows
 
we have just come off an endless summer road,
stopped for play after miles of wheat and Milo
and dust billows from the siege of tractors
chugging fall planting furrows across the dry plains.
 
I join them squeeze through bottom silt with them,
peek under lime-colored algae bend together in depths
which sucks all that is living down into it up I feel
the urgent sun soften feel my skin swallow then close
 
it seldom happens a respite like this pulled from time
the children recognize this rake their fingers purposefully
through the slowly eddying afternoon drag for tadpoles
newt eggs ideas filled with unfathomable possibilities

###

Devin Harrison has published poetry in numerous periodicals throughout the US and Canada.  These magazines include:  Contemporary Verse Two, Grain, Event, The Amethyst Review, Kansas Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Passages North, and others.

The Blues

 by Amit Parmessur

Around blue, white oceans,
in a blue and black house dwells a black
speck. So black, so blue –
black alive, emotionally blue.
 
Sometimes like a fresh road, after the rain,
spellbinding every periwinkle and
sometimes imitating a baffled bluebird

he has had the blues so, so often that
he never listens to the blues and
his eyes have long gone into his
socks that smell of cheap cigarettes.

On his neighbors’ lips are perched
black curses that threaten to recreate
him every day, and his disloyal wife’s
hair flies in the wind in such a way
that she might inspire him into frothing
himself off some mossy cliff, any time
on one of those moonlit, blue nights.

He’ll never understand that he’s
the symbol of a country losing itself
because of people like him.

###

Born in 1983, Amit Parmessur lives with his black cat nowadays. Since 2010, his poems have appeared in more than 100 literary magazines. His book on blog Lord Shiva and other poems has also been published by The Camel Saloon. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and lives in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius. As long as he gets published, he knows he is on the right track.

IV.

by Dr. Prakash Kumar

A helpless worm on the point of a needle,
Wriggling in vain for release,
The indecision and cowardice in the matters of Sex,
Before eyes appear attractive but mercilessly searching-
Making  the desire – Cold.

Photo by Diena Grant-Thomson

Spider

 by John Wright

This overcast morning
leaf and lawn are drenched in dew-soaked air.
My window frames a filigree masterpiece
of lilli-pilli pollen buds and scribbling eucalypts.
I watch a bulbous spider
beige as paper-bark, build her web
busily embroidering
a white St Andrew’s Cross
oblivious to the beauty of all she is.
She tats a delicate network of interconnections
weaving no frills.
She spins beyond entanglement
labouring to create a nest for new life
while lacing, with precise obsessive care
a jewelled snare.
In circular creation, beginnings are ends.
Her life-&-death work
is designed to attract innocence that strays.
This dull gun-metal day, beside a dry
leaf-curl mysteriously spinning
in no breeze, on a single invisible
thread, she sits and waits.
Bright yellow stripes across her back
warn the wary she’s there.
Her four pairs of long legs
have become the white diagonal
preparing to pounce and wrap
the future in a shroud of silk.
She knows the fate of prey.
And as she waits under a veiled sun, poised
at the centre of her mythology
her abdomen grows.
She knows her children will be fed.
Ready to kill or burst
with life, she glows.

###

 John Wright was born in Cheshire, England 1950. Visits to County Mayo, Ireland in childhood left lasting impressions as did weekend work on a farm in Cheshire. Arriving in Australia in 1969, he worked as a psychiatric nurse and received the NSW Premier’s Award for 40 years Meritorious Service. His poems have been published since the 1980s. Now retired, he lives with his family near Gosford on the Central Coast of NSW. His current book, CHESHIRE BORN
was published in 2011 by Balboa Press.

Sisters of Bondage

By

Gavin Gerngross

She filled the tube
with her red.
A prism of weeks reduced to jelly,
this nutria,
scattered among the glade.
Reduction: dollop of discontent.
Tilling imagination flocks out at will. 
By nightlight, there are prayers
of meager request
scrolled across the carpet.
In this manifestation, heat
pulling at her socks, the breach
of her white sister’s sheets.
The collapse of an entire stage
in one movement
of the hand, an
elbow changing the landscape.
The harsh tickle of two fingers.   

###
Gavin Gerngross is 34 years old, a graduate of the University of Houston with a degree in Creative Writing. He has been married 10 years, has a daughter, Trina, named after his deceased sister, and a son, Asher, named both the tribe of Israel and Chaim Potok’s character Asher Lev. Despite being laid off twice in the past year, he still resides in Houston; because he loves the city a little too much. He is affectionately known as, G, but only by his wife, Jami. Gavin Gerngross has no website links to speak of.

Plans

by Jane Hanser

He who offered so much life
lies resting in the ground
Stones and grass and monuments
and flowers all around

Our breaths are frozen in the cold
Our thoughts more frozen still
Our son his youth a memory
upon this wind blown hill.
 
We’ll ne’er forget his laughter
or his smile or his face
The plans and schemes and hopes and dreams
The warmth of his embrace

And then our ailing hearts
are shaken, roused from misery
And turn we must to other deeds
that God hath for you and me

###

I’ve an M.Ed. in English Education and TESOL from Temple University Graduate School.  I taught English and ESL at CUNY for 14 years, as well as in Camden, New Jersey and Valencia, Spain.  I’ve written and developed a popular software program for high school and college-aged learners of English.  I have a self-published grammar book, The Grammar HELP! Student Handbook which will be revised this year under a new title and as an e-book.  My blog, “Dogs Don’t Look Both Ways”, has, for several years, attracted a number of people and dogs who have found solace and encouragement in the story of crisis and hope, and in interacting with Joey, the Labrador Retriever, on the blog. The story was subsequently covered in the print editions of the Newton Tab (Newton, MA) and on the front page of The Daily News Tribune (Waltham, MA). I live, work, write and play in Newton Centre, MA.

Uma y Boris

by Amy Wright

    Let us long because we are to be filled…
    that is our life, to be exercised by longing
      -Saint Augustine
   

The nighttime of our lives is filled
with crickets chirping in the darkness
of their dark bodies. I hold your hips
with the grip of my thighs, twitch
when you kiss my temples—thrum
the counterpoint of peace as an
argument for peace

The rhythm is in
the unexpectant break
of melody.
  
When you give me each movement
of your grandfatherʼs tango
by opening and closing
your eyes, I can read anything
and never have

 in this language
I am learning to speak
so that  I can explain it
to your mother,
offer her something
in the southern manner
when you leave the sails
of her arms for mine.

      Tell me
   everything
except  el momento
preciso you began
to scent our bed w/
the waft of another,
because knowing it
has no reason
 is not to trust
 the ending.

###

Amy is the author of three chapbooks, Farm, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and the forthcoming The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip, which won the 2012 Pavement Saw Chapbook Award. She is also the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 journal and Zone 3 Press.