New Ways. By Don Robishaw

Vagrant’s Thoughts: Old ways don’t work these days. Panhandling calls for patience, persistence, and writing skills. A Sharpie and invented spelling are acceptable on a raw sheet of cardboard. I’ve got an idea. I’ll offer a service even better.   

Driver’s Thoughts: An unfamiliar old bearded dude in a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and jeans mills around on a traffic island at the Lincoln intersection on the outskirts of the gated village I’ve always lived in and taps the corner of a squeegee against the mirror of my vintage BMW.

“Brother can ya spare a dime?

Need a drink and ain’t got no money.

and ain’t got a dime”

   

    “Where is the other guy who usually washes windshields?”

Bearded dude with a tear in his eye bows and blesses himself as I go through my change says “My friend’s not coming back no more but ‘left behind’ a message for ya.”

Fumbling around in my beggars cup. “What?” 

“Shove the dimes up your butt ya cheap bastard.”

Don Robishaw’s collection of five FF tales found in, ‘Bad Road Ahead’ was the Grand Winner in Defenestrationism, 2020 Flash Fiction Suite Contest.

Don’s short story entitled,’Bad Paper Odyssey’ was a semi-finalist in Digging Through the Fat 2018 Chapbook Contest.

His work has also recently appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, Drunk Monkeys, Literary Orphans, Crack-the-Spine, FFM, O’ Dark Thirty, among other venues.

Many of the characters he developed have been homeless, served for periods of time in the military, or are based upon archetypes or stereotypes he's met while on the road. He likes to write poetry, satire, tragedies, and gritty fictional tales — of men and women from various backgrounds — that may have sprouted from a seed, from his past.

Before he stopped working to write he ran educational programs for homeless shelters. Don's also well-traveled, using various ways and means: Sailor, Peace Corps Volunteer, bartender, hitchhiker, world traveler, college professor, and circus roustabout.

She Bathes in the Water Color Wash of Internal Light by Jeannie E. Roberts

After an image by Charles Dana Gibson (American Illustrator, 1867-1944)

Your somber mood and sloping cigarette 

may pair well with the favored cocktail of your creator — 

though, gin garnished with pickled onion is an acquired taste.

Gibson Girl, 

you appear weary as you pose in inky nonchalance. 

Do your arms shield you from darker orbits? 

One day, 

the barrier between you and everything will dissolve —

perhaps you’ll awaken in water color wash,

slides of blush, streams of coral, 

where tangerine meadows flow near spills of pastel, 

as slips of subtlety move toward internal light.

Even pen-and-ink lives, 

linear narratives, 

can render softness, 

when focus buoys 

with eyes at center, 

where sentience is breath.

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored four poetry collections and two children's books. Her work appears in print and online in North American and international journals and anthologies. She is poetry editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. When she’s not reading, writing, or editing, you can find her drawing and painting, or outdoors photographing her natural surroundings. 

7:15pm, Suburbia in the Pandemic by Alyssa Trivett

Laughlin Rd and Farren Lane.
In the land where no one uses turn signals, by the park of smashed in trash bin always reeking of bowling alley sweat. Two teenagers see-saw their words. Dog leashes whir and half broken lawn mowers chirp and cut rocks in half. I spy chain-smoking clouds as the conversation revs on in between siphoning down sodas in scratched glass bottles; face masks on their spoon rest chins. I say to myself, aloud, that is poetry. We tally runners, and friends and former neighbors and passed on relatives; and think that everything can't be that bad, right now. The sun is up and pours down on us even at this hour. In Mid-August heat, the words still visit, at least.

Alyssa Trivett is a wandering soul from the Midwest. When not working two jobs, she chirps down coffee while scrawling lines. Her work has appeared in many places, but most recently at Ex Ex Lit, and Duane's PoeTree site.

Evening by Holly Day

I press my nose to the window wonder
when you’re coming home. Each time
someone walks past the house I
think it’s you.

I busy myself with things I know
would make you happy if
you’d only come home. I make your blankets
smell like my skin so that
you’ll dream of me when you’re in bed.

The sun goes hot and high then sets.
I eat dinner alone, think of your key
clinking against the door
hear your footsteps in the hall
in my head

where will I go?

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press). 

COULDA BEEN by Patti Cassidy

It coulda been a noir,
The way he grabbed her arm
And she didn’t move an inch.
You just knew where it would end up-
Who would double cross whom-
Where the final bullet would hit-
And who would end up with the dough.
It coulda been a noir-
But it was just another night
On the south side of town
In the middle of summer
With a jazz combo playing the blues.

Patti Cassidy's been on the poetry beat for most of her life, but she's best known for her  plays- many of them set in bars. Find her in Boston... or Paris. Or wherever fine spirits are sold...

Escape by Gloria Mindock

Trying to escape, but I am surrounded by flatland.
No place to go. 
If I stand behind the tree, you will find me,
behind the barn, you will find me,
behind the house, you will find me.

You would not expect me to hide
down by the Illinois River or in the
caves of Starved Rock. I will be there until
my body decays and I feed some other life form.

I will become a beautiful plant.
When you walk past me, I will
give you a rash.

 Gloria Mindock is the founding editor of Červená Barva Press and one of the USA editors for Levure Litt e raire (France). She is the author of five books of poetry and her 6 th book called, “Ash” is forthcoming this fall by Glass Lyre Press. She has been translated and published into 8 languages. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award, was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center, and was awarded the 5 th and 40 th Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice. She was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.

Telling the Truth by Dan Provost

Aerosmith took
me from wine to
whiskey within hearing
the first chords of
Chip Away at the Stone…

Figure I could be cool
and intellectual here…claiming
that Sinclair Lewis was the source
of my Jack Daniels improvement…

But rock and roll stays as a Lord’s Prayer…

Plus lying is a mortal sin

Dan Provost has been published throughout the small press for many years.  He is the author of nine books and lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura