Not Concrete by Anthony Ward

Not Concrete
by Anthony Ward

In our indeterminate future
I imagine stepping onto a barren landscape
Looking over at symmetrical mountains
Towering above immense craters-
As if set in stone.

Yet this world is not concrete.
It’s a living thing,
It grows and breathes-
Is constantly moving,
Prone to different temperaments
While it wails with despair.

Its grey complexion obscuring
A vibrant colourful persona
Exulting from the darkness,
That’s sheer lunacy to ignore.

Anthony tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including Enhance, Drunk Monkeys, Speech Therapy, Turbulence, Underground, Ginger Piglet, Torrid Literature Journal and The Rusty Nail, amongst others.

Someday i’ll write a poem by Diane Boisvert

Someday i’ll write a poem
by Diane Boisvert

About the sky
About the vastness of the undiscovered
portions of my mind

About the solid ground
About the tears spilt,
Splitting the earth, rendering unsolid
stability unquakable

Until its secrets spray uncatchable
Until it is grasped gray with colors
dripping between clenched fingers

Open, open up, oh hand
Send back those hues unto the clouds
Where they’ll reign unrained a mystery.
and i will say with certainty

Someday i’ll write a poem.

Diane Boisvert poetry has appeared in Taj Mahal Rview, Camroc Press Review, Monkey Kettle, Feathertale. Indigp Rising, Madswirl, Flask and Pen, Psychopoetica and is forthcoming in the Raleigh Review

CARBON CYCLE by Ray Sharp

CARBON CYCLE
by Ray Sharp

About the things we burned.
The leaves we gathered
so many brittle memories
raked into poem piles
we lit
and oh how they caught
and burned
signal fires on hilltops
dispatches from the front lines
tactical maneuvers
casualty reports
little pyres
clean down to ash
that turns a grey mud
in the season’s first cold rain.
Some things are meant to be burned.
Some deserve
the necessary fires that purge
and release
the magic of pencils and diamonds.
With the scent of strawberry and smoke in your hair
I could love you still more.

Ray Sharp writes about the place he knows best, the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His poems have appeared in dozens of on-line and print journals. Ray’s chapbook, Nothing Abides, was published in 2011 and his first full-length collection, Memories of When We Were Birds, will be available before the end of 2012. Ray blogs at raysharp.wordpress.com

The Other Grandma by Ann Haynes

The Other Grandma
by Ann Haynes

I heard about her, all my life.
Just a devil, bane of my father’s existence,
judgement personified. (He’d married a Jew. So I am a Jew.)
Not the Nice One. The Other Grandmother.
Nana. Nana. Nana.

She died when I was two.
I remember the wake: my older cousins running around, chasing
a tin flying saucer toy. It whirred along the floor, lights flashing,
making such a noise.
They chased it, pushed each other at it. Ignored me,
scared out of my wits. Never saw the like.

The adult men would disappear into a room, come out louder.
I remember very well. They smelled funny.

My father’s face: gleeful.

My mother in all her classy glory,
keeping herself to herself, not saying one damn word.
The Catholic witch was no more.
Ding Dong.

But this photograph, just got it. It’s Nana and me.
I am maybe 8, maybe 9 months. She’s holding me.
I look happy. I’m glad to be there.
She doesn’t seem to think I’m a Jew.
She seems to think I’m a baby girl.
The arms encircling me look just like mine do now: long and lean.

My cousin described her ways, wrote it all down:
One thing I’ve noticed is, when I sit and pay bills,
I do it like Nana.

Ann Haynes is a mom, writer, part time bartender, and office worker. She often wants to say what’s what while on the job

BLACKBERRY Kenny Fame

BLACKBERRY
Kenny Fame

That stunning body design. She
text him into every line of
her palm; exceed all available
space. He’s built stronger
than the stench of urine in
any New York City Housing
Project elevator. Much tougher
to get through than, Times Square.

She savors his kiss good bye; with
her neck hair’s raised. Goose bumps
instantly appear; like Braille on both
arms: vibrate one missed call displays
how (her) body is (his) touch screen.

Kenny Fame is a African-American poet who was born in Paterson, New Jersey; but he currently calls the village of Harlem in NYC his home. He was a recent graduate of Cave Canem’s 2011 & 2012 Poetry Conversations Workshop classes. He was the winner of “The Tenth National Black Writers Conference Award for Poetry.” He has been a featured “Poet of the Week” on the Poetry Super Highway during the week of January 2-8, 2012. His work has appeared in numerous journal both nationally & internationally: Steel Toe Review # 7& 10, River Lit #5, The Fine Line, Emerge Literary Journal # 1, Rufous Salon (Sweden), Milk Sugar, Prompt Literary Magazine, De La Mancha, Anastomoo, ken*again, Assisi Journal, African-American Review, Gloom Cupboard,Black Magnolias Literary Journal # 6.2 & The New Verse News on December 18th 2011

Premature Yearning by Matt Dantes

Premature Yearning
by Matt Dantes

Telephone rings and I am
seven and sleeping in my own bed
and across the way is my little brother.
He wakes up before I do and the clock
blinks red the phone bounces.
My seven-year-old legs part the sheets
and carry me to the phone and there I hear
things I don’t understand and something
about an alarm when I hear my father’s feet bounding
across his wooden floor.
Down the stairs he comes and takes the
phone from my hands and holds it to his ear. His eyes are
red and he grumbles words that I do not understand. I look
across the kitchen at the microwave light green and see
a time I’ve only seen during day. My father is no longer
holding the phone and instead has his arm around
my waist and hoists me over his shoulder and
carries me up the stairs and tucks me into my bed and
my little brother pretends that he is asleep. I hear,
some minutes later, the car start and I sit at the window
and watch my dad pull out of the driveway to do
what I thought was the greatest job in the world.

Hailing from Long Island, New York, Matt Dantes is a burgeoning poet, storyteller, pianist, visual artist, occasional bartender, and student at Adelphi University.

A Fine Wine by Anthony Ward

A Fine Wine
by Anthony Ward

These finely aged novels,
Stored like bottles in a cellar,
Become all the more portent with maturity.
You want to drink their contents,
Be intoxicated by their words,
Until they have you speaking so fluently
The language pours from your mouth,
While those staid sober
Will stress you’re slurring incoherently-
That they’re far too precious to be drunk.

Anthony tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including Enhance, Drunk Monkeys, Speech Therapy, Turbulence, Underground, Ginger Piglet, Torrid Literature Journal and The Rusty Nail, amongst others.

The Sleepover by Tricia McCallum

The Sleepover
by Tricia McCallum

A Friday morning, Grade Six, and all
anyone could hear was the conspiratorial talk of the girls’ sleepover
planned for that night.
I kept waiting for the tap on my shoulder,
the invite whispered in my ear.
Stayed close to the girl’s cabal
at recesses and long after school until it finally sunk in.
My face in the pillow that night, the fear I would drown
in my tears.
There were a thousand little deaths,
strung out until morning.
How can such moments not define us?
Not ruin us
for anything good
that might ever come after.

A Glasgow-born Canadian, Tricia McCallum is the author of a sequence of poems, essays and photos entitled “Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered.” (2011). Her poems “Thirst” and “There’s Always the Guy” were chosen by readers at goodreads.com as the winners of the poetry competition in December, 2011, and in May, 2012. Two of her poems, “Following Seas” and “The Gift of Donovan,” appeared in the first issue of the quarterly poetry e-zine called IMPpress. Tricia’s poem “The Island Dog” will be included in “Estuary,” an international poetry and visual arts album to be printed in England in December.

Tricia invites you to read more of her work at www.triciamccallum.com

Full Shade by Sonja Johanson

Full Shade
by Sonja Johanson

Today, she aches. She wakes with the long stretch
of groaning belly and back, the howl of inner thighs
unused to slaving, fingertips ripped by thorns.
Yesterday, all day, was spent crouching, weeding
the shady soil she had ignored for so many summers.
Toad-lilies revealed themselves behind the crunch
of jewelweed stems; ramps, planted before
her third child came to take her time, shot
up minute scapes. No one knows the things
which grow in the beautiful dark, the lungwort,
wood poppies, swaths of bloodroot advancing
out of mind. She opens the garden, remembering.

Sonja Johanson serves as the training coordinator for the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association. She has recent work appearing in the Albatross Poetry Journal and Shot Glass Poetry Journal. She divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.

the language of leaving by David LaBounty

the language of leaving
by David LaBounty

she needed
more
than she
wanted
and i
wanted
more
than
she needed

so we stopped talking to each other that way

after
the
silence
we set
the children
on a
raft

placed them in the river after dark

we turned
their heads
to the sky
and said

look, the sun will be there

somewhere

David LaBounty: My work has appeared in several journals including Rattle, the Los Angeles Review, SmokeLong Quarterly and many others. I am the author of the novel Affluenza and the recent poetry collection moon chalk. I have held jobs as a miner, a reporter, and a salesman. I live in Michigan.