Say something By Joshua Knickerbocker

Sometimes 

I share a room

With people

Who've forgotten

How the sharpness

Of voice can cut

Now, they're 

Eroded smooth

Easy to pick up

Easy to throw

Trained to nod

Trained to laugh 

Like a clock

Tic-toc 

Tic-toc 

Telling time

But missing

The sunrise

Yes ma'aming

Hours away

Until

The day

They'll be free

Now I stare

Alone

In the mirror

Asking

Where has my time gone?

Where are my edges?

Why am I so easily thrown? 

Tomorrow

I'll fight

The flowing current

If not tomorrow, 

One day

I'd hate to die with regret

I've spent 19 years as an emergency advanced nurse practitioner, watching the weak, poor, rich, entitled, sad and everything in between. Feeling the daily whip of life cut anyone and everyone. I still provide emergency care, but spend my days teaching college these days, 

Shot by Susan Isla Tepper

I stopped reading your face 

and addressing your silence.   

Went to the woods and shot 

wherever leaves moved.

Down one path to the next

led by a series of 

heavy truck tires that

churned up the ground 

as if they knew me—

my unconscionable needs—

the dirt deeply unforgiving. 

Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty year writer in all genres. Her stage play "Crooked Heart" will be featured in Origin Theatre Company 'May Play Festival', NYC.

The Patron Saint of Queen Street Grill, Honolulu By Trish Saunders

There was no need to duck your head

when we saw you waiting tables  

at the local shrimp grill,  

your wages so meager 

they might feed birds. 

Just tell the driver, I’ll pay next time  

and take a seat on the bus with us.

We also remember lustrous dark hair.

The beauty school will dye it for free on Tuesday.

Trish Saunders lives in Seattle, formerly Honolulu, formerly Snohomish, a small town on a big river in Washington state. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Off The Coast, The Rye Whiskey Review, Medusa’s Kitchen, Open Arts, and the late, lamented Fat Damsel Press. 

a hollow darkness by J.J. Campbell

i was 23 and madly in love 

with a woman that wanted 

nothing to do with me

i never could tell from the way 

we kissed or the way we fucked

but after a loud evening of alcohol 

and knives

i was suddenly burdened with 

the truth

i was a weigh station

a rest stop on a road i was unaware 

i had turned on

there is a hole in my heart that 

never recovered from this

a hollow darkness that teases 

me at night

who thinks about dying alone 

while watching porn

all your better angels died 

years ago

just us lonely souls out here 

now

how this all ends

your guess is as good as mine

but i expect an urn, a toilet 

and someone needing someplace 

to hide their drugs

J.J. Campbell (1976 - ?) is old enough to know better. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at Synchronized Chaos, Disturb the Universe Magazine, The Beatnik Cowboy, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Black Coffee Review. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

waste not | want not By Stephen Ground

smash my empty

glass

 

then

scoop &

gently

suck

palms of

jagged shards

to

sloppily

savour

the

coppery sting.

Stephen Ground is a writer and filmmaker based in Treaty One Territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba).

I Want to Stare at the Sun Until My Eyes Are Ashes by Jay Passer

Because she drives me to hedonistic acts

Because the beach is strewn with rotting porpoises

Because my body won’t process sugar into ethanol

Because my father is a golem captured in a medieval frieze

Because I cannot identify with sports enthusiasts anymore

Because she would rather climb a wall inside a postmodern structure

Because I won’t peel grapes or scrub the bathtub

Because I refuse to pray to alternative deities

Because broken glass is inedible

Because I sleep in a palm tree and shower under arc-welder’s sparks

Because her frontal lobes are as relentless as an adolescent Hypatia

Because my tongue has replaced the wax buildup in my ears

Because it’s getting dark out in Paris and Knossos

Because the earth is passively yielding to militaristic industry

Because suffering in silence is how I feed my black heart

Because she doesn’t need a hitman to come to her rescue

Because light is too incandescent and the dark too bottomless

Because I’ve regained my libido amongst bull elephants in musth

Because spooning dragonfruit into her mouth is akin to feeding a little baby

Because if you cross me I will shove a broomstick in your eyehole

Because I am sick and ought to be committed to a hospital and restrained with a straightjacket

Because our jams include both Erik Satie and Sinatra

Because the end of the street is the cliff and the abyss

Because the stars are made of carbon in flux

Because she is everything I am not

Because I am an idiot savant drooling and toothless with a spoon in one fist and a boner in the other

Because it is not so goddamned righteous being one with the cosmos

Because we still need to fold paper cranes together at a cantina in the semidarkness

Because when I’m just a skeleton she’ll go on to birth a messiah

The poetry and prose of Jay Passer has appeared in print and online periodicals, magazines and anthologies, in subterranean basements and men's room stalls, cave walls and space shuttles, since 1988. He is the author of 15 collections of words, symbols, diatribes, missives, isms, schisms, rain drizzles and blood fizzles. A cook by trade, he's also dabbled in daubs, photo-montage, reverse Feng shui; while failing at mortician's apprentice, news butcher, and criminal savant. Passer's most recent chap, Son of Alcatraz, was released in February of 2024 from Alien Buddha Press, and is available on Amazon.

The Last Place on Earth For a Grinning Man By Troy Schoultz

With your morning coffee and french toast fritter.

When the snow falls, its always Sunday

With nothing to do, but look out the window

Listening to the radiator tap out a code

On how to live at this exact shard of moment.

That winter coat you’ve not worn in eight months 

Holds a twenty dollar bill.

A haloed sun endures through snowfall

Like a polished silver coin.

Walking downtown,

Painted signs against the brick wall are 

A lucky red, like Chinese weddings and second

To last chances.

There are still newsstands, rows

Of magazines to pick and read

At the table by the frosted window,

You hold her hand, and hang on each others words.

Old men play cribbage, young women laugh,

Nobody fears eye contact.

You can almost pretend that the internet

Was never invented, that phones stayed home.

Coffee grinders roar above the music,

And you think you will maybe stick around

A little while longer, watch the street lights

Like stars refusing to acknowledge they've died

TROY SCHOULTZ is a poet, analog collage artist, and apparently, a survivor. He is the author of three full-length collections and two chapbooks. He makes his home in Oshkosh, WI. He is currently working on a novel, but ain't they all...