Photo by John Benitez ISSUE 23 Ron Riekki The Ghosts Can’t Brush Their Teeth Because They Can’t Hold a Toothbrush My Next-Door Neighbor is a Gun Owner and I Know Because His Car Reminds Me Every Day Someone Told the Scarecrow that He Needs to Lose Weight I Wrote a Poem and My Poetry Professor Said […]
Category Archives: Issue 23
Featured: 4 Poems by Ron Riekki
The Ghosts Can’t Brush Their Teeth Because They Can’t Hold a Toothbrush It’s the reason they howl. The cavities. The pain. The ghosts aren’t trying to haunt us. They’re trying to get us to brush their teeth. They just don’t know how to do it subtly. Imagine the pain. Turn whatever you’re imagining right now […]
2 Poems by Sarah Sarai
The Great Mute Who Is Almighty . . . and I have wondered, from that day to this, why he did it. -Julian Bond One morning you head to the McDonald’s near 150th Street, knowing when you order a one-dollar coffee the server will ask What size? and you’ll think Small then change to Large, […]
I Have Aced a Realtor’s Math Course by Anna Butcher
/My mother is going into the business of starting over/ Spent the last three weeks learning how to sell people houses they don’t need/ because their home is already made elsewhere/ Her wrists have tightened into stretched rubber bands one snip away from becoming fringe/ I sit beside her on a wooden chair and write […]
Map by Karen Neuberg
The edge is a map. A misstep, a missile. Sinister to touch, siren to call. Imagined in storm, on the stair in the dark. Might lead to a table. To a cellar. To a stall. Could be the answer, searched for or not. Surrounded by promise. Hidden by hail. Stacked to the brim so the […]
2 Poems by Neil Carpathios
Atlantis Sometimes I go to where giant seashells hold humans to their ears. Where there are bars you can order passion, make it a double, and they serve a tall glass of all the feeling squeezed out of every time you’ve been in love or in lust, or will be. Where you can flip people […]
Versatile Angel by Michael Cole
He’s into his seventh century and on his thirteenth set of wings. Ashen gray frayed feathers. Leather straps cracked though he oils them every other week. Buckles rusted. He’s tired. Angels, I am told, don’t get sick, they just get tired. The affairs of humankind can be taxing and require a certain stamina which he […]
Who Could Ask for More? by Brad Rose
Just tuned-up my flamethrower, otherwise it wouldn’t be a fair fight. God knows, it’s not easy working in the service sector. Pretty soon, I’m going to reverse my polarities, too. Shake things up a little. Have you ever wondered what’s under all those islands? They look like they’ve lost a lot of weight. If you […]
False Confessions by Mike James
The time you panhandled for tattoos. The monthly payments for transcendence. All the famous people either waived at or had orgies with. The time you found the burnt wreckage of flaming shoes. Childhood spent tossing pennies behind the Red Dirt Cabaret. The mother who worked as both a nun and a stripper. The medical journal […]
Myths and Facts About FBI Informants at Writing Workshops by Catherine B. Krause
Recent events have led many to question whether agents of Big Brother are attending their writing workshops. Here are some often-believed myths to be busted: Myth: An informant has to tell you if they are an informant. Fact: This is maritime law not applicable on land. If your group meets at sea this may apply […]
To Throw a Party by Kira Homsher
I am in prime form. I am unmarketable. I am perched on the tip of my own index finger. I am a velvet jewelry box with nothing inside. I wear my father’s old dress shoes and fox trot into the unknown. I sing Gregorian chants in empty subway stations, plotting my escape from the city. […]
Superhero AA by Aidan Chafe
He arrives late wearing his civilian costume, grabs the last chair in our circle. George is rambling, kicking around a tired story like a Hackysack—something about his ex-wife, a final notice and too many Coors Lights. When the floor is his he cracks his concrete knuckles, stares at his steel-toed boots, introduces himself and recites […]
Hard Times by Ulrica Hume
None of this is real, he says, and the path slopes down to a house that is possibly haunted. One always looks in such windows, one cannot not look at the predictable detritus of another’s failure, a queer satisfaction, a fairy’s dust. But no, not real, none of it. And the trailing wolves, soft in […]
Artifact: September 1963 by Carla Panciera
My mother holds me on her hip in a cornfield. Though I can’t see her feet, she must be standing on stubble, or between the rows of stubble where the earth will be dry. She looks away from the camera. This is the moment when she will try to get me to see my father. […]
Mary Is in the Marketplace by Korena Di Roma Howley
And while she despairs over the impossibility of looking everywhere at once—into every teeming passageway, every gloomy pocket gone unchallenged by the daylight—she loses precious time by looking nowhere at all. Seconds, then minutes, slip away in paralysis, and inside this terrible stillness, her mind begins to wander. She remembers him as a baby, how […]
Mockingbird by Peter Cashorali
The mockingbird loves something larger than himself and calls to it, wherever it is. He has in his throat an inexpensive prize from a box of Cracker Jack by which he is a spring of voice, calls in scrub jay, linnet, seagull, a few words in canary, a single phrase in dolphin. He springs into […]
Sharon Tate by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple
A lot of things happened to you but I was only there for one of them. Fall, 1989, fully 20 years after the grisly stuff, maybe a little longer after Valley of the Dolls, a boy, not from my neighborhood, dressed as you for Halloween. He wasn’t what you’d call thin, no. Fleshy, maybe. Certainly […]
This Legion of Edges by Lee Potts
A knife made of broken mirror is entirely blade and damages any hand holding it. It leaves left over bad luck on the wound’s sticky edge with flakes of silver leaf. A knife with a paper blade is sharp enough to skin soul from spirit, light from lens. Fire releases its edge to the sky. […]
Everything is Random by Thad DeVassie
When a thief pried his way into our home with the intent to pillage and inflict harm, I didn’t flinch. Instead, I said, follow me, and we walked out the back door, avoiding the neighbor’s peering eyes and resulting gossip, then made our way a half-dozen blocks to the corner mini-mart. With exception of our […]
3 Poems by Nicole Callihan
Craft Talk (3); Zermatt You dream of a small goat with a bell around its neck. When you leave the bed and go to the window, there is moonlight on the Matterhorn and—bathed in the moonlight—is not one goat but a thousand. Looking closer, listening more deeply, you realize there are not one thousand goats […]
October in Lazio by Ann de Forest
We can view calmly the massacres that happened centuries ago, laugh at the gruesome hellfire, the sharp teeth and twisted tails of devils carved on the façade of a ruined cathedral. I happened upon a suicide in the Piazza di Montecitorio, where the Italian Senate meets. I gazed up at the Renaissance roof and noticed […]
Regrettable Vesper while Waiting for Autumn by Samuel J Fox
Let’s call this the summer of sweat-stained nostalgia where I pour out enough only to be filled with indecision. It is mid-August and cicadas are leaving their skins behind under my bare, busted feet. I buy a new nose ring in hopes I look different than I did the day before. Let’s call this the […]