Easter Egg Hunt By Sharon Waller Knutson

All dressed up 

in bonnets,

crinoline, 

and patten leather

at two and five

my sister and I find

hidden 

in the back yard

a dozen colored

eggs and two 

bottles

which mama

snatches 

out of our baskets

and pours

the stinking liquid

that smells

like daddy

down the drain.

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist and a widely published poet who lives in a wildlife habitat in Arizona. She has published ten poetry books including: What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say (Kelsay Books 2021,) Survivors, Saints and Sinners (Cyberwit 2022) and The Vultures are Circling (Cyberwit 2023.) Her poems have appeared most recently in ONE ART, Black Coffee Review, Verse-Virtual and Your daily Poem.

The City of Secrets and Regrets By Karen A VandenBos

There was something about the city.

The way they couldn't breathe and felt

walled in, surrounded by brick and mortar

while the smell of toxins and waste fed

their egos with fear.

A cement jungle where beggars and thieves

pound the pavement, dodging gun shots at

2 am and church bells summon the lost souls.

Claustrophobic in its density, everyone looks

for someway to escape as they scurry into

alleyways to break bread with the rats.

The city hums with trauma, off beat music

and broken hearts. The noise offensive.

Those left to sleep on benches bear witness

to yesterday's news and learn to read the

language of silent lips and vacant eyes.

Like zombies they exit buildings as the clock

strikes five o'clock. They meet at the bars

to fill a void and raise their glass as a prayer

to the fallen angels.

They chew on stale conversations, inhale

the dreams of others and exhale their bitter

thoughts. Maintaining a distance, they

hunger for touch.

With the taste of disappointment on their

tongues, they look for hope in the gutters

in a city full of secrets and regret.

Once upon a time, Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in

Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in two online

writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal,

Blue Heron Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, One Art: a journal of poetry,

Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ekphrastic Review and others.

Drunk in the rain at 2am. By Dennis Moriarty

I have walked a lifetime in an hour through

the rain and I am whiskey soaked

and sodden, half cut and talking to myself

as if I am an audience of thousands

listening to my words for the very first time.

A preacher poet delivering

the gospel according to Jack Daniel's, lurching

between thoughts, stumbling 

over metaphors and slurred words on my

twisted lips.

An owl interrupts me, a nocturnal heckler 

shouting me down, 

challenging my anti establishment rhetoric,

calling me out for the drunk that I am.

I answer him back will ill chosen humour and 

crude banter, with a sneer and a snarl.

I continue to talk to myself, to a dwindling audience

of the owl and I,

the rain pounds the street, jack hammering a hole

in the pavement into which I fall,

desperately clutching Jack Daniel's close to 

my chest.

Tail spinning, nose diving like a wounded bird,

down into the darkness,

caught in the endless echo of oblivion that 

regurgitates my words, 

my confusion, over and over again.

Dennis Moriarty was born in London, England and now lives in Wales. Married with five grown up offspring Dennis likes walking the dog in the mountains, reading and writing.

In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and went to county Cork in Ireland to read his work at the international poetry festival. Dennis has had poems featured in many publications including Blue nib, Our poetry archive, Setu bilingual, The passage between and others.

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.