Fumes By Patrick Carella

The yellow pump icon had been on for miles. I cradled the bottle of Reyka in the crook of my arm.

Two women stood outside the liquor store, comparing their lottery tickets.

“Ya know, we spent forty-two dollars on these things today.”

“Suckers,” I said, just loud enough to feel it.

I slipped into the Outback, the seat giving the way it always did. Checked the mirror. She scratched, flakes blowing back into her face.

Fuck one-in-a-million odds—unless it’s something bad. Then I don’t miss. Never have.

Skeeter Davis came on, singing about the end of the world. When I was a kid, that song meant my parents were gone and I was still here. 

Now they are gone.

The song still plays.

The gas light was still on. I’d gotten used to it—how long you could drive before something gave out. How far you could push it.

The low glow of mortality—ignored, familiar, inevitable.

Patrick Carella is a former advertising creative director and School of Visual Arts instructor whose fiction, creative nonfiction, and humor have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, BULL, JMWW, The Hooghly Review, Eunoia Review, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, CaféLit, Gorko Gazette, Wicked Shadow Press, and other journals. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

UP AT THE BAR By John Grey

It’s the kind of evening

when stale barroom light

is warmer than a fireplace.

And my thirst sits up at the bar

followed by the rest of me.

“What’ll it be?” asks Ted,

as he always does,

even though my order never changes.

A beer,

a friendly conversation

with Ted,

with the drinkers on both sides of me,

no wonder my smile wishes

it could always be like this.

But drinking is time

borrowed from the outside world,

and there comes a time

when it demands repayment.

So outside the night’s waiting 

with its cold breath and its bills to collect.

It employs two heavies –

home and sleep.

 

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Willow Review and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the MacGuffin, Touchstone and Willow Review.

the white horse tavern has gone to the dogs By John Grochalski

you can’t even get inside

because there’s some fat lady 

blocking the door

eating a caesar salad

with dressing on her chin

tourists crowd the rest of it

with their tourist faces and tourist smiles

outside coeds from nyu

sit a picnic tables

drinking mimosas and vaping

eating something called smash burgers

in the cool spring breeze

jesus christ

this used to be a longshoreman’s bar

but now they croque madame

like they’re from france or something

the white horse tavern

has official gone to the dogs

jack kerouac can finally go home

and dylan thomas

can keep spinning in his grave

because money talks here now

and bullshit has to go and find himself 

another place to get a drink.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.

THE SUBURBAN CUL DE SAC By Dan Flore III

it’s where I learned to shoot free throws

I dragged the trash out to that curb on 100,000 Tuesday nights

sitting out there I had my first hit of marijuana

I felt her up in the car

the suburban cul de sac is the end of the road

and just the beginning of so much

Dan Flore III’s work has appeared in over a hundred different publications. His latest book that’s available is JUMBO POETRY (Crying Heart Press)

Intangible By Jenna Restel

One more shot

before meeting the floor,

sinking into the hardwood. 

Sweat from my skin, 

spilled bourbon, 

and tears all come together. 

The room moves

as I lay still, and your face 

somehow evident in my mind. 

So, erasure, impossible, 

dark liquor, reliable,

and misery,

eternal. 

Jenna Restel is a New Jersey based writer. She explores grief, memory, trauma and bad habits. You may find her published poetry in Keeping the Flame Alive, Bionik Pu$$y, Rust Belt Press, Crying Heart Press, and more. 

906Blue~ By Tracey Sivek

Countless moments have been spent in separation, defining my role in this life in a singular way.  

Divine caught me off guard. I found myself falling into the vision, the view of someone else’s dream.

It was exciting and accelerating to think someone could see the world the same way that I see it from that quiet space never talked about.  

To feel that combined interest in energy as it developed through the simplicity and rage of the blue.

The depths of currents and chaos.

This was an unexpected journey, one that asks only to be lived.. I want to simply sit in this and let it be the organic unfolding, but there’s a child like interest…a spark that has been lit in the voided layers of the dark. A flame has been ignited.

Wanderer, I see the shadows that placed you into these moments of beauty. Seeking redemption, seeking healing on all levels. 

Your essence, your light was created from this space.. the peaceful warrior. 

 

Perhaps this is a thread from another lifetime, remembering itself through us. It feels too ancient to dismiss.

I want to acknowledge it for the layers of mystical that it holds. The way that nature speaks to us in divine ways. From the peace of the crystalline core of the Earth to the soothing depths of the healing waters. Then, the fire, searing through your life, letting us burn entwined for a moment.

If this is where our paths were meant to meet, then I am grateful for the blue… for the healing waters… for the fire that remembered our names. I ask for nothing more than this…that wherever the universe carries you next, it is with peace through the vast Wilds of the universe. 

I see you.

Tracey is a native of Northern Michigan. 

 She has work on Writerscafe and Cosmofunnel. She is also the Author of "Zero Evidence of Life" found on lulu.com.

Her publications include .

The Abyss, Under The Bleachers , The Rye Whiskey Review and The Dope Fiend Daily.

Her latest book For The Love Of Lily  is currently available on Amazon.

https://a.co/d/0hSH9eG9

Drifting Wine Cup By Ma Yongbo

In late spring, the water filtered through sand and stone grows loud again.

The stream leaves huge boulders on the shallows, pale grey like skulls.

We sit facing downstream, tucked in a mountain hollow.

Behind us the grass grows taller and denser,

tall enough to hide our feet, to hide tangled roots within it.

Once, across the stream we could pass wine cups and strawberries,

pass the shadow of trees, pass a single yellow leaf newly shed from last autumn.

With a light touch upon the water, we too sent the tremors from upstream

all the way downriver, through pebbles and dark mud on the riverbed,

to the soft bank, the willows along the bank, the wings resting on the willow branches.

We turn our backs on the source,

on the high mountains beyond the source, the dwelling place of clouds.

We know not what drifts over from behind us.

We have forgotten the path we came by.

Facing away from the future, we sit quiet and still,

waiting for the breath of widening waters drifting from afar,

waiting for the whole world to swirl past us and flow downstream.

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of Difficult writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce American postmodern poetry into Chinese.

He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell,Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. His complete translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. 

https://www.facebook.com/yongbo.ma.2025/