The Hag

by Robert Herrick

The hag is astride
This night for to ride,
The devil and she together;
Through thick and through thin,
Now out and then in,
Though ne’er so foul be the weather.

A thorn or a burr
She takes for a spur,
With a lash of a bramble she rides now;
Through brakes and through briars,
O’er ditches and mires,
She follows the spirit that guides now.

No beast for his food
Dare now range the wood,
But hush’d in his lair he lies lurking;
While mischiefs, by these,
On land and on seas,
At noon of night are a-working.

The storm will arise
And trouble the skies;
This night, and more for the wonder,
The ghost from the tomb
Affrighted shall come,
Call’d out by the clap of the thunder.

###

Robert Herrick, born in London in 1591, was an English lyric poet and cleric who became one of the most notable Cavalier poets of the 17th century. His father, a goldsmith, died in an accident when Robert was young, leaving him to be raised by his uncle. Herrick received his education at Westminster School and later at St. John’s College, Cambridge, before briefly apprenticing as a goldsmith like his father.

In his early adulthood, Herrick became part of the “Sons of Ben,” a group of poets who admired and emulated Ben Jonson. This period in London significantly influenced his poetic style. In 1623, Herrick took holy orders and was appointed as vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire in 1629, a position that would shape much of his life and work.

Herrick’s major literary achievement came in 1648 with the publication of “Hesperides,” a collection of about 1,200 poems, alongside “His Noble Numbers,” a set of religious verses. His poetry often celebrated the English countryside, explored themes of love and mortality, and embraced the carpe diem philosophy. However, his career was not without turbulence. During the English Civil War, Herrick was ejected from his vicarage in 1647 due to his Royalist sympathies, only to be reinstated after the Restoration in 1660. He continued to serve as a vicar until his death in 1674 at the age of 83, leaving behind a legacy as one of England’s most cherished lyric poets.

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Black Spider, Purple Grace

by Kris Statler

Arms and legs and shoulders.

Arms and legs and shoulders.
I kiss what is presented to me.
My kiss is black, a spider,
tear drops clinging to the web,
cursing the horse I rode in on.

The spider’s mane spreads on the pillow,
all eight arms waving,
sticky with silky threads, sprawling.
Who knows how many webs?
We weave a worn, rumpled road
right up to the darkness.

A mouth is presented,
and I slap a spider right on there.
It passes from mouth to mouth
to dirty, goddamn mouth,
until it returns,
crawling back into the web.

And then I’m back in my car,
wondering what the hell just happened.

I was a child, then a mother,
then the ground you walk on.
I was a girl, then a boy,
then a girl again.
Balancing on a single strand,
one foot in front of the other.
In heels!

It’s the edge of the world
as we know it.
So, I drive straight over the edge,
coloring outside the lines again.
So messy.
So messy am I,
with my arms and legs and shoulders.
With his arms and her legs over their shoulders.

And the spiders.
The steamy, leggy arachnids,
large enough now
to make me remember
what I was worrying about the moment before.

That light can only press the dark.
Full body contact, inch by glorious inch,
can only keep her down just so long.

Remember the stretcher from grace?
We have drawn one in:
Harold’s purple crayon from grace.

Upright again,
I spread the spider-colored web
to cover, comfort, capture,
every word,
every thought,
every goddamn glimmer in the eye,
every long-legged stroll
into and out of my life.

Which begs the question,
who IS this begging here?
Up on their haunches, tongue lolling,
eight eyes to match the eight arms,
reaching out to push my buttons.

Turn me on,
turn me off,
flip the switch,
switch my skin until it stings.

That damn black spider
sinks into my fangs,
and I poison it with purple grace,
hoping it will remember me
when I need it.

Kris Statler currently writes from her semi off-grid tiny home on the island of Maui, where she has lived for over 35 years. She is the author of the Birth on Maui series and serves as a consultant to Pacific Birth Collective, a nonprofit she co-founded. Her work spans a lifetime of lived observation: through birth, motherhood, divorce, grief, love, and the cultural and historical complexity of Hawai‘i. She is currently crafting a poetic memoir that blends personal narrative and verse into a story of transformation.

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Odysseus

by Ron Micci

it mightn’t have occurred
to Odysseus
to wear long underwear
in the Aegean night
if Penelope hadn’t gotten it
so perfect and right
the postcards were few
and often waylaid
her oaths of fidelity
tested and frayed
Telemachos my son
good steadfast boy
sure as the surf spray
pride and joy
twenty years’ wait
is a heck of a stretch
with Poseidon acting
the part of a wretch
surrendered at first
to Kalypso’s nymph clutches
seven long years
without help of some suches
Athene my proxy took matters to Zeus
who messengered Hermes, thanks, thus I sprung loose
on a raw sea awash in Poseidon’s old tricks
I had one of my own, not with stones but with sticks
and lanced out his Cyclops son’s misshapen eye
then returned to the voyage with hopes breasting high
though the snares seemed unending, singing Sirens and such
Circe’s hot lusts ever warm to the touch
we forged on ahead, with tough sacrifices
Scylla the she-monster’s six-headed vices
a choice between feeding her many-mouthed cravings
and risking a whirlpool of Charybdis’ mad ravings
lotus-eaters offered narcotic enticements
to make us forget the here what and why(ce)-ments
and Aeolus, the wind-maker, with his ox-skinned bag
unleashed one last insult, one more blast, one more snag
but the shores of Ithaca loomed clear at long last
I prayed dear Penelope’s heart had held fast
beset lo these years by a surfeit of suitors
would I still on Olympus have one or two rooters
I’d slip through unnoticed on Ithacan shore
a poor hapless beggar that most would ignore
save an oxherd and swineherd whom I now befriended
and this was the prelude, our story soon ended
enduring yet insults from Penelope’s suitors
I set down the challenge, with few to no rooters
who might string my longbow, a feat of great strength
all takers soon failed, and then at length
I let fly my arrows, the slaughter commenced
long years of exile, by blood recompensed
a handful of suitors resorted to spears
which Athene deflected, to resounding cheers
I finished the others, with strong spears alike
until I had made my final last strike
Penelope, darling, come soft in my arms
delivered on high from travails and harms
now let our passions run wild and free
me unto you and you unto me
as husband and wife, devoted and dear
loving and faithful, our hearts ever near
our hopes will be buoyed, ecstatic, sublime
on seas of devotion, for now and all time

A prolific author of plays, screenplays, novels, poems and short stories, from the comedic to the serious, many available for perusal on the Booksie, Stage 32 and Amazon websites, Ron Micci is a published playwright (Brooklyn/Heuer Publishers) and former magazine editor. His one-act plays have been staged in Manhattan and throughout the country. His piece “My Redacted Life” was recently published on the Confetti website and his short story “Snatched!” has been selected for publication this year by The Brussels Review.

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Blindsight

by Julie Dexter

Before the world was ember and ash,
before we knew the sky by name,
before mycelium laced the dark,
networking nourishment through its roots.

Before I could lose myself in the
vast expanse of star and tree,
or think of the green-lit-calm of a garden.
Before language cracked the silence,

before creed laid testament to all that was.
Before being, before stillness, star, and void,
before the first ripple of thought. Before DNA spiralled like a prayer,
before krill assuaged the sea’s first hunger —

What was there?

As painting is to light,
so poetry is to time and
we have already lived a thousand lives;
hybrids of stone and fire,

kings and beggars, saints and beasts.
Yet knowing this will not unmake hunger
for war and power,
born from myth, might and greed.

Knowing this will not return the lost, or make the broken whole again.
We are blindsided by the promise of escape. With fecundity we dream of vanishing,
of sinking back into earth again,
threading ourselves through the dark, regenerating, reliving without choice. Without knowing why.

###

Julie Dexter is a writer and poet, born in Leicestershire, currently living at the North Sea coast, Kent. Her writing explores themes of imbalance, seasonal change, climate change and how this interconnectedness impacts the human condition. Her main key achievements that demonstrate her current artistic trajectory include:

• 2023 Pen to Print Poetry Prize winner
• Poetry pamphlet published through Pen to Print/Barking & Dagenham libraries
• Haiku publications in The Leaf Journal (2023)
• Regular contributor to Write on! Magazine, featuring poems and conducting writer interviews
• Honourable Winner of All Poetry Newcomer prize, 2025
• Middlesex University Anthology, Opening Fictions, 2010
• Creative Week, short story, 2006
• Tresco Times, an Isle of Scilly magazine, Short story, 2006

Her socials are available for those who would like to follow her journey.

Instagram: @LateNightSwimmer
X: @JulieADexter
Web: www.juliedexterwriter.com

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Crocuses

by J.M. Summers

Knowing without having to be
taught, that this is a time of
waiting, too. There, settled on
the rooftop, poised, a pair of
magpies dreaming not of sorrow,
but the spring that lies braced
beneath frost caked, frozen soil,
steadied before the easterly wind
against whose face we bend.
Broken? No, not broken yet, but
holding to the possibility of days
gentler than these, the glimpse,
unexpectedly, of crocuses breaking
through parched soil thirsty for
dreams of the season new.

J.M. Summers was born and still lives in South Wales. Previous publication credits include Another Country from Gomer Press and various magazines / anthologies. The former editor of a number of small press magazines, he is currently working on his first collection.

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Birds Send Him in Shock

by Kushal Poddar

Even during the ceasefire
a volery of birds tenses him,
tautens his muscles, gives him
goosebumps. Seventy seconds,
it takes to run downstairs
and some more down to lie down
inside the womb of a porcelain tub
and to draw a broken door on the top.
The parrots fly by; pigeons circle back.
One lone dove builds an abandoned house,
births a boy flying a translucent kite
in the electric blue sky. He remains drowned
in the dry tub. He remains the remains of him.

Kushal Poddar is the author of ‘A White Cane For The Blind Lane’ and ‘How To Burn Memories Using a Pocket Torch’ has ten books to his credit. He is a journalist, father of a four-year-old, illustrator, and an editor. His works have been translated into twelve languages and published across the globe.

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Momentary

by Bruce McRae

This moment in time
depends on a suspension of disbelief,
on the unwritten mores and motifs
of the mobile vulgus.

This moment is the last moment,
and the next, and the next to last.
Where you’re in a musty corner
of an ever-expanding universe
and watching the clock grow old, when
you’re a polished stone, desire’s afterglow,
a sum in the long division.

The moments come and go,
minute scenarios as seen from a train,
a cycle of stories about to be told,
an augment of imagination.

This moment is captured in amber.
This moment is stealing a kiss from God.
And this one slips the net,
a golden sturgeon at the head of the rapids.

Time murders truth and trust and toreadors,
this moment a million Buddhas
in the Asia of your mind, a billion instances.
And this moment now, this vacant heart,
this neverness in the grand forever.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his next book, ‘Boxing In The Bone Orchard’ is coming out in the Spring of 2025 via Frontenac House.

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My Name is Jim and I’m a Poet by Jim Murdoch

In 1998 my daughter gifted me a framed copy of a
poem which sits, to this day, on my bedside cabinet.
It is the only poem of hers she ever let me read.

Some people want their kids to be doctors
or barristers or to play for
[ insert the name of your national team here ].

I should want my kid to write poetry and it
wouldn’t kill me if she did—
the world needs all the poetry it can get—

but to be totally honest I wouldn’t wish this
on my worst enemy;
let others call last orders and ring the knell.

I know she’s dabbled and I’m fine with that.
I tried to be supportive
without being encouraging but that’s hard.

Doctor’s take off their white coats at night
and barristers their wigs.
Poetry’s not a career. It’s an addiction and

no one in their right mind would ever, ever!
want that for their kid.
It’s in the genes though so I hold my breath

and wait, although it’s quite possible it might
skip a generation since
her mother was more of a reader than writer.

That said, poetry tends to make up the rules
as it goes. So, we’ll see.

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and (increasingly) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

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A Day at the Office

by Mark Kerstetter

Boggled.
Paper stacked beneath a box of pencils,
paint hardened in tubes,
images not rendered fill mental
picture frames like engorged
intestines.
A perimeter of nails, now rusty,
encapsulates the unreliable frames.
A pummeled palmetto bug drags itself
out of the dust only to
halt in the dead
center where
apples tumble
back onto
the tree.

###

Mark Kerstetter steals time away from restoring an old house in Florida to write and make art out of wood salvaged from demolition sites. His poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Jerry Jazz Musician, Unlikely 2.0, Evergreen Review and other journals. He is the former poetry editor of Escape into Life and blogs as The Bricoleur

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The Intersection

by Aaron Poochigian

One Wednesday in America at night
someone was in a pickup running, running
from wrong back there where nothing worked out right:
the hopes that bombed, the love that turned to shunning,
jail, juvie and a neonatal ward.

Sucked up into injustice, he ignored
all that his wide-eyed high beams brought to light.
Quail flickered, and abrupt mile markers grew
greener, then swooped into the past abaft.
A plastic bag lurched like a twisted kite.
A farm with barn and slaughterhouse, a raft
of lit efficiency, came passing through.
But these phantasmagoric waifs and ghostly
surprises surfaced harum-scarum. Mostly
the edgeline, white and wanting to be true,
drunkenly went about the brink it drew,
and center strips stitched contours as they dashed.

Such wonders failed to fetch our absentee.
Soon, though, a far-off nodding body flashed
a telltale yellow, a portentous code
that yanked him outward from his beef with life.
The omen spoke:

there was another road
approaching, an oblique trajectory
athwart the one that drove him. It would run,
with time, as main street through some center rife
with bars and diners, with the interplay
of known dead-ends and new things to be done.
Sure, there’d be more flush bosses grudging pay,
more bible-thumpers damning real fun,
more girls who won’t give you the time of day,
but it might be a change.

There was no one
to yield to, but he stopped there anyway.

###

AARON POOCHIGIAN earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

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