The tragedy of your life
is not that you were without
a centerfold of curves
or pregnant
with a sky empty of luck
but rather
that you kept returning
to a man you mistreated,
a token lover, a mistaken identity
hidden under your mother's bed,
you nicknamed him Cat
and sent him scampering alone
without a bowl of minced fishbones.
You pretended to cry in front of strangers
how he died without a proper diet
of Omega-3s.

Kyle Hemmings has two chapbooks of poems out: Avenue C from Scars Publications, and Fuzzy Logic from Punkin Press.

Thru a dime store
magnifying glass,

prisms of sunlight     
dissolving dry brown leaves
into smoke.

My friends,
all impressed.

 
Ben Rasnic lives in Maryland, works in Virginia, drives the Capitol Beltway on a daily basis and is not surprised by anything he sees along the way.

TO TODD MOORE

Old schoolteacher cowboy poet
Way back in your eyes
Your pain saw stories
And touched lives
Lesser beings never noticed
Or, noticing, chose to hide

 
THE OLD BOHEMIAN PIPER BECKONS TO A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES

An agony of happiness
Is not to be dismissed--
Forsake assisted living,
Screw your kids’ inheritance,
Surrender what remains
Of your pride and your life
And dance, grandma, dance.


Born in Detroit, Steven Gulvezan has worked as a journalist and a librarian.  His fiction and poetry have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Scythe, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, Heavy Bear, Gutter Eloquence, The Absent Willow Review, Battered Suitcase and many other literary publications.

Rage spreads
mutes agony

disguises intention
distorts history

fuels dementia and
incites delight.

Judy Shepps Battle has been writing poems long before she became a psychotherapist and sociology professor. Widely published both in the USA and abroad during the Sixties and Seventies, she deferred publishing to concentrate on career and family. These poems represent her return to the writing community.

You were the first to be found
head down in the sewage
of what we do for a living
but time will purify that.
Your wife is losing weight
in the hope that grief will
make her body attractive,
and it will. She is radiantly
unhappy without you,
but worst off is your daughter,
wrapped in the newspaper
that announced your death.
She walks alone in black high heels
down the corridor of sterile engagement.

Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009) His poems have appeared in Poetry International, PANK, DIAGRAM, BLIP, new aesthetic, and numerous other journals. He lives in Illinois.

If we were in Spain today
and if you were to ask
Do you love me? And if
I were to answer Oranges 
from China you would
cry because that means
No Way in the parlance of
Spaniards and in other places
actually Spain only, really
definitely not China or
thereabouts but if you 
were to cry after my Oranges
from China remark I would 
hand you my handkerchief, 
not out of pity, but out of 
love, for there are no oranges 
in China, not when I think
of you, no way are there
any oranges or China there.

Ricky Garni is a graphic designer. Yesterday he discovered that the coolest person born on his birthday was no longer Haley Mills or Teri Garr, it was McCoy Tyner. McCoy friggin' Tyner. Ricky Garni is so happy that he was born on December 11th. I mean now he is, since yesterday.