Becky By Ian Lewis Copestick

You know
those
bullshit
quizzes
that you
come across
when you're
just flicking
through shit,
on your phone ?

Well, I saw one,
saying " Answer
These Questions,,
And Our Algorithm
Will Guess Your
Name "

Well, as the most
observant of  you
may have realised
they guessed that
my name was
Becky.

You have no
idea
how much
this
worries
me. 

Ian Lewis Copestick is a 49 year old writer (I prefer that term to poet ) from Stoke on Trent, England. I spend most of my life sitting,  thinking then sometimes writing. I have been published in Anti Heroin Chic, the Dope Fiend Daily, Outlaw Poetry, Synchronized Chaos, the Rye Whiskey Review, Medusa's Kitchen and Horror Sleaze Trash.

Anke-Biters By Taya Boyles

A boy held my breath

in the deep end 30 days before my twelfth 

birthday. When I resurfaced 

I thought of myself as a water witch

after his swimming lessons, a propulsor,

above my time and age. 

Reckoning I could dance on water.

My childhood nickname was "Ariel"

I was a water birth,

who never lost my voice

but grew legs at 11.

If those boardwalk stares were any

indication, I had quite

the pair.

We finished our flask before the cocktail hour,

and by the garter toss, we stumbled onto

the beach, into the crashing waves.

Suddenly ravenous didn't seem appropriate

to describe newlyweds.

We were always moving, falling downstream, falling into each other.

I call his name when an ankle-biter 

goes for my father,

stopping his tires in their tracks

and spitting him back onto the concrete

in a cul-de-sac, I still avoid.

I still say time ripped out his spine and his brain

never blaming the hunter-orange Jansport

carrying Fireball and Dasani bottles,

with holes burned out the lids,

before everything starts to leak through the tear

always bigger than the last time,

and out it flows like water through open hands.

I try to hold on to carry it, you, me, my father, my sobriety,

and not wish for a rewind, where we are all back on the sand,

sun-drunk and drunk drunk,

where everything that fell was 

good enough for the ground.

Taya Boyles is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia. She is currently a senior pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Taya's writing journey started at just eight years old and has come a long way from misspelling glue. Since then, her poetry and flash fiction has appeared in literary magazines such as Split Lip Magazine, Vermillion, Pwatem, Hot Pot Magazine, Radical Zine, and more.  

Social Media:
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tayabtheauthor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tayatheauthor/?hl=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tayaboylespoetry. 

give that demon the finger By J.J. Campbell

i wake up each 

morning with a 

demon tapping 

me on the shoulder 

and asking how 

severe would you 

like the pain to be 

today

before i answer

i check all the 

bottles of booze

when the bottles 

are full i give that 

demon the finger

when they start 

getting low

i know it’s a day 

where i will have 

to conquer the 

world of hurt

J.J. Campbell was raised by wolves yet managed to graduate high school with honors. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at Misfit Magazine, just good poems, Synchronized Chaos, The Beatnik Cowboy and Horror Sleaze Trash. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

“Professor” By J. B. Hogan

Once a brilliant young professor, 

expert on Wordsworth, Coleridge,

classically educated academic star,

feted, celebrated, shining in classroom, 

literary journal and at cocktail hour.

He knew his way around a liquor cabinet,

the local university watering holes,

developed a heavy smoking habit,

kept a half-full cup of clarity on his 

office desk and in the classroom,

sipped from its dregs hourly.

Then, one late fall day, late in his career,

he fell, tripped and fell, felt weak and fell.

By Christmas it had spread like fire,

from the kidneys to the back,

inoperative, fatal.

Buried on a cold day in February,

a sparse crowd recalled his intelligence,

his erudition, his incomplete promise.

Back at school, a janitor found the 

cup, considered it, then tossed it in the

trash and swept up the empty classroom.

J. B. Hogan has published over 300 stories and poems and eleven books, including Bar Harbor, Bounty Riders, Time and Time Again, Mexican Skies, Tin Hollow, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Rubicon, Fallen, The Apostate, and Angels in the Ozarks (nonfiction, local professional baseball history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Devolution By Alec Solomita

Do you recall when a password

was the spoken talisman

that let you into a treehouse

looped by dark leaves?

Or permission to slither

Through the narrow mouth 

Of the hump of a snowhouse

Your older sisters built each winter

Or the chance to be offered entrance

To a game of spin the bottle

In the make-out room in

The secret sunless barn out back.

Did you ever forget those passwords?

No, I thought not. Did you gravely

pencil them into a loose sheet of paper 

then another, and just in case, another?

Pirates, soldiers, buccaneers,

Wild, moon-loving romancers

spurred you and all kids

to devise them and hold ’em

as close as a straight flush

so even the bad boys

up the park couldn’t

drag them out of you.

And did you ever harbor

even a whisper of a notion

that in future under siege by

a glut of indecipherable scribbles

on frantic scraps of paper,

staring at a passive screen,

unending passwords would 

join forces to crush your spirit?

Alec Solomita is a writer working in the Boston area. His fiction has appeared in

the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, among other

publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry

has appeared in Poetica, MockingHeart Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, The Lake, The Galway Review, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His poetry

chapbook “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017. His full-length poetry book,

“Hard To Be a Hero,” was released by Kelsay Books last spring.     

The Night I Slept Against The Wall By Skaja Evens

He hits the booze a little too much

Then declares he’s safe to drive

Later, fumbled attempts at sex

Leaves her wondering why she tolerates it

Skaja Evens is a writer and artist living in Southeast Virginia. She runs It Takes All Kinds, a litzine published by Mōtus Audāx Press. She’s been published in various places, including Spillwords Press, Medusa’s Kitchen, Ink Pantry, Off the Coast, Synchronized Chaos, and Blue Pepper. She can often be found listening to music, considering the impossible, and enjoying her cats’ antics.

driving into monday By Scott Ferry

the clouds open at the end of this tunnel / like the speck of light at the end of a steel tube / the way vonnegut describes human vision according to the tralfamadorians / the olympic mountains in a far away flame / icy diamonds ripping open the dawn / wild horses cover by the sundays playing / we’ll ride them some day / there is heaven at the end of that suffering / we are supposed to hope for something running away from us / in this vehicle eating oils of long dead things / coughing out smoke / lurching toward a promise / the eyes get hooked in the shimmer / the road is always longer / the songs are sad because the horses always escape / the condition of moving in a darkness toward a brilliant death / where everything is lost / and everything is grasped when the body fails / but then it is too late to go back and tell the man the child in the rainwetted sarcophagus / that they are already god / that the wait was an illusion / holy swindlers selling books / all sickfingered time and plot devices / that the myth of chasing was a ruse / that heaven is the place we are / a plate of half-eaten pancakes / a cat yowl in the mirror to the boy grinning in the back / and his tooth diamonded meow in return / a laugh and spark / a ripping open of the tunnels of steel / a wide wide shine on the wheel in my hands

Scott Ferry writes things. He is a RN in the Seattle area. His latest books are The Long Blade of Days Ahead and Midnight Glossolalia (with Lillian Necakov and Lauren Scharhag). More of his work can be found at ferrypoetry.com.