State Regulations by Nick Maurer

I thought about pouring it down the storm
drain on my street. The ocean

harmonizes dark and discordant futures.
Or under night's binding I could pour

the tainted mixture in my neighbor’s large yard.
His fence rattles against lengthening summer winds.

But I’ve left the bucket out there
behind the broken bicycle pump and among

the splintering leaves blown in and crumbling stucco
blown down and cracked terra cotta pots filled

with pests and tares counting on tomorrow’s sun
to evaporate the waste I keep

stirring up, the plans
I have for this bucket.



Nick Maurer received an MFA from UC Irvine. He lives in California. Website: jnmaurer.com

Blood in a Drought Year by Joe Cottonwood

In a midnight thunderstorm, Jeannie phones
to say a young man pounded on her door
dark and bleeding like a redwing blackbird
so she wrapped his ribs in a sheet.
“Wait a minute. You let him in?”
“Of course! He’s darling!”
Jeannie is 80, still a coquette.

I go next door to Jeannie’s house.
On the floor, drops of blood.
Back yard I find a sheet, scarlet stain.

She won’t let me call the cops.
“He’s the stabbee,” she says. “Not me.”
The oak trees drip but the rain has stopped.
Jeannie shivers hugging her own chest and says
“No matter how badly my body hurts,
nights like this keep me alive.”

Thunderstorms drench the night,
quickly pass. After lightning,
the air is so crisp, so fresh.
We need the rain.



Joe Cottonwood can’t help it. He’s drawn to mountains and a more hardscrabble way of life. From Maryland at the foot of Appalachian ridges, he settled in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California among wildfire and redwoods and the occasional lion.

Sunkissed, Listless by Ash Evan Lippert

Pretend I’m here, in the grove, lilac clouds
like sleeping lion’s heads nodding

against blameless green,
breathing. Say: I am here. I am still

nothing.
& now I will embrace the ebb

to thoughtlessness.
A robin sends

light branches shaking purple.
Failing petals may only

fall, paling in the wind like February
snow. Impermanent. Barely

probable.
& where am I really?

In my apartment, too real & bodied & strewn
amongst my sweat-stained

covers. Watching
the evergreens scatter their ever-green,

clover colored light bare
across my blank-stare walls.

Someone help me, I’ve forgotten how to live
here, in my time;

here, where trees reach to the sun,
unashamed of their need.



Ash Evan Lippert is a clay artist and emerging queer poet residing in the South Carolina upstate. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Failed Haiku and Euonia Review. They are happily at work on their first novel, and the ongoing project of parenting two "whimsical" cats. To check out more of their work, please pay them a visit http://wanderstruckreverie.wordpress.com/

Oldest Son by Al Ortolani

As a boy we had a dog die
about once a year. They ran loose,
each morning leaving the house,
returning at night from wherever
the neighborhood pack took them.
We knew each member of the pack by name,
by their owner’s names,
by their speed, their thievery, their bark.
They chased cars on the county road,
and ate the poisoned meat
the farmers set out for rats.
Dogs were free. By that, I mean
we never paid for a puppy.
They came to us tumble deep
in cardboard boxes. Someone
always had a dog to give away.
A “Free” sign, once painted, was kept
in the garage next to the scrap lumber.
Mother handed me a shovel and the car keys.
She said, go before the others get home.
I used a towel, rubbery with Shinola.
I sunk the spade like my father did,
used my weight to lift the earth.



Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award.

Nearing Sedalia by Al Ortolani

There’s a silo along the highway
with a tree growing out of it, the top
branches splayed across the sky
like an umbrella, like an anemone.

It’s a landmark for us as we drive
across Missouri, as much a mile marker
as a small town, a fishing creek
with an iron bridge, a cemetery

in a children’s game.

We watch for it on the hill
behind the barn, behind the ghost sign
faded across the barn roof:
hickory baskets, walnut bowls, moccasins.

The silo is made from tile bricks,
carefully cemented, the domed roof
of sheet metal and wood collapsed,
blown into the pasture, the sapling

in a cylinder of sun.



Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award.

Uprooting the Lilac by Al Ortolani

Today, we plant a Limelight hydrangea
in the hole where we dug out the lilac,
where just a month ago, I chopped back
the roots with my garage sale axe.
My wife gave up on it ever flowering,
tall and spindly, spreading
everywhere and nowhere at once.
She gave it seven years to get itself together,
to become a lilac goddammit.
The shovel popped and bent as I pried
the root ball from the earth, the brown
soil, greasy with clay, with shards
of sandstone. The tap root gripped
until it gave, and only the silence held.



Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award.

Bingo Faith by Ellen Skilton

What if loftiness is a false flower —
and the church’s real purpose is
bingo faith, not sanctuary salvation?

My grandmother was a prophet
of generosity, her cash creed:
You don’t win if you don’t give it away.

Much more than mad money,
her profits from games of chance
were pillars of her ballsy beliefs.

She’d quietly teach me her own
moral code, whispering of her best friend:
She never wins because she keeps it all.

Once, I saw her use her own shoe
to create a secret stain and a righteous
discount on an overpriced baby hat.

In the early 80’s, when I had big hair,
born-again friends told me this scorching untruth:
Your grandmother is going to hell.

These Saturday-bingo-grandmas
that don’t pray in pews get tut-tutting from
Sunday-church-goers so damn sure they’re blessed.

They are all wrong. Helen’s holiness shined
in bright kitchen light, adding up winnings
and givings in her flowered, cotton housedress.



Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in The Dewdrop, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Scapegoat Review, and The Dillydoun Review. She is also an excellent napper, a chocolate snob, a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia with a dog named Zoomer, a cat named Katniss and some lovely humans.

The Chapel by Brandon McQuade

In the quiet hours
the wind howls
and the snow drifts
like mountains.

The fire burning
in the hearth
of the chapel,
in the heart
of birch and frost
is not lost
on this wilderness.

These are the keys
to our survival
and comfort—
necessary fragments
of our domestic,
modern world:

knife, tent, firestarter,
pen and paper, a good book
and a sack lunch—
companions we carry with us
like torches into the wild.



Brandon McQuade is the founding editor of Duck Head Journal. His debut chapbook, Bleeding Heart was published by Kelsay Books (2021) and is available on Amazon. His debut collection, Mango Seed, is forthcoming with Scurfpea Publishing. He lives in Gillette, Wyoming with his wife, Jacqlyn and their children.

Between Us by Deirdre Fagan

My husband takes the dog along
to gather the mail.

His grey matching winter’s muzzle,
a retriever seamlessly blending into snow.

The walk to the box is as long as a meadow;
a city block to remember from whence he came.

Once, there was no dog, no country home,
only letters through a slit in the door.

Four bedrooms, one occupied—no children,
no wife.

We are nearly ten years into this game—
we’re still playing.

But that’s not what he’s thinking as I eye
him from the window—the dog flanking his calves.

It’s the distance that excites, it’s the return;
it’s the marrow between us.



Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, mother of two and associate professor at Ferris State University. Fagan is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me (forthcoming, 2022), a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater (2020), and a poetry chapbook, Have Love (2019). Meet her at deirdrefagan.com

Arlington Racetrack by Jason Fisk

I used to want to spend
my summers
at the horse track
writing about the characters
I would see there
but I never got around to it

Now the track has
permanently closed
and I’m stuck writing
mediocre poems
about failed plans
to write great poems



Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last few decades in the Chicago area. He has a novel, The Craigslist Incident, coming out in June. www.jasonfisk.com

Ghost Garden by Jason Fisk

She lived alone in the middle part of the country
In a little blue ranch house with white trim
She loved her family and her garden
The grandkids helped her weed
when they visited from out of state
She would reward them
with cinnamon candy
and iced tea

She used to straighten the house
every night before bed
I once asked her why
and she told me
that it was for the paramedics
She didn’t want them
to see a dirty house
when they came
to take her away

She told me that she
was just waiting
to go be reunited
with Grandpa Earl
in heaven

After her funeral
I went to the blue house
and walked inside
It was clean
which made me smile

I walked to the back
and opened the sliding glass door
and saw her garden
The overgrowth reminded me
of how long it had been since I’d visited
An aching loss churned in my stomach

And then I noticed a sweet little rosebud
peeking through the purple and green
of the inhospitable thistle
and I started pulling
the weeds away
from the base of the rose
My arms and hands torn
by the various thorns
It somehow felt right

I went into the garage
and got a shovel
and a bucket
and I dug the rose up
and put it in the bucket

I drove to her new grave
and planted it
where I imagined
her heart would be



Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last few decades in the Chicago area. He has a novel, The Craigslist Incident, coming out in June. www.jasonfisk.com

Winter Birds by Jack Powers

I keep thinking they missed their cue,
seduced by some false November sun
and now suffering for their sins.
Such scrawny legs and feet, translucent claws!

Yet they seem to survive: chickadee, junco
nuthatch, cardinal. These birds of winter searching
for seeds, spiders, tree buds, fluffing their feathers
for warmth–alone, in pairs or flocks
that litter my yard or string themselves
in black rosaries across the sky.

In a blizzard they disappear, huddling,
I hope, in hedges, the downwind side of trees.
In the morning sun, a nuthatch flutters in a backyard fir,
tooting his horn like an answered prayer.



Jack Powers is the author of Everybody's Vaguely Familiar. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Cortland Review, Inkwell and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 Connecticut River Review Poetry Contests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 Rattle Poetry Prizes. Visit his website: http://www.jackpowers13.com/poetry/.

All I Was Ever Told by Jason Ryberg

Down through the clouds’
raggedy, tattered fabric
and the trees’ veinous limbs,
branches and twigs, the moon
shone blue, sometimes,
on the tin roof of the old
(semi) converted tar-paper
shotgun shack I lived in,
for free (mostly), that year,
out back of the big house
where my somewhat effete
and mildly eccentric friend
lived with his very eccentric
mother, like something straight
the fuck out of a goddamned
Faulkner or Capote novel
another friend was overheard
to say (complete with idiot
man-child kept in the basement
I, myself, often suspected),
and all I was ever told was to
mow the lawn and shovel the snow,
help yourself to the liquor cabinet
and try not to burn the
whole place down.



Jason Ryberg is the author of thirteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. His latest collection of poems is Are You Sure Kerouac Would Have Done it this Way!? (co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2021).

W. C. Fields, Esq. (William Claude Dukenfield) by Richard Weaver

said many things memorable. Most funny.
He juggled words the same way he did balls 

in the air as a tramp with fake beard and faded
tuxedo. Cigar boxes, canes, tennis balls, hats.
All became part of the Eccentric Juggler’s act.
Masterly. World class. Between pool, cards, 

alcohol, movies, and women, he kept many things
up in the air simultaneously. He once said
“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”
At the end he said to his mistress of many years,
“God damn the whole friggin’ world
and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.”



Richard Weaver volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and was, until Covid, the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. He remains the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005), performed 4 times to date. Recently, he published his 150th prose poem since 2016.

The Threat of Keepsakes by Louis J. Fagan

The quilt survived the flood,
tattered muddied forlorn, I
rescued it from the waist-high
river water in the basement

fly-fishing waders strapped on, I
descended the stairs into the cold
black water staking its claim
to space intended off-limits

the Christmas angel, crockery,
kept books, preserved Barbies,
photos, CDs bobbed like buoys
in my wake as I waded through

the quilt had been neatly draped
across the back of the wooden rocker,
half-submerged it now drifted aimlessly
on currents I couldn’t feel

I’d saved the quilt once already, taken
when my mother-in-law cleaned
our closet during the visit she’d made
to help with our first born, years ago

it lay wadded up next to garbage bags
for pick up at the end of our driveway
when I pulled in from work, what’s my
great-grandmother’s quilt doing out there

I asked my wife when I came in the house,
quilt rolled, tucked beneath my arm, the baby
in her arms, swaddled in a blanket carrying
with it the threat of becoming a keepsake too

fishing in the river water was one thing,
casting a line and pulling out trout,
but reaching into it, surrounded by four
walls, for the quilt chilled my arms, my soul

drenched and cold, material thinned
and frayed from age, it tore away from my touch
when I scooped it up and spread it across
my shoulders, tightening it to my chest



Louis J. Fagan is an English professor at FMCC in Johnstown, NY. He is currently at work on a novel based loosely on his short story, 'Slit,' which was published in Weber: The Contemporary West. More of his short fiction can be found in Typehouse Literary Magazine and Five on the Fifth.

The Lead Stereos by Ed Ahern

On the deck of our house
are two seventy-pound stereos,
curves opposed, print facing out.
Lead still shiny, headlines still legible
after fifty years of weathering.
The base for a glass-topped table.

They are an obelisk for the
slow death of print newspapers,
and the withering away
of balanced reporting.
The profession I trained for
gone electronic and shrill.

No one misses the smudges
of lamp black and petroleum oil,
or the hassle of recycling,
and in a few more years
no one will care that
newspapers gave us the world.

There was an underpaid nobility
in reporting investigated facts
and recording marriages and deaths,
and the current, fleeting buzz
leaves us all with little sense
of permanence and place.



Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of nine review editors.

Five Beautiful Words by Lisa Molina

          (elegant, peaceful, inspiration, warm, womb)

The elegant fish swim in the bubbling tank.

The purpose: To provide a peaceful place in this room of bald children
connected to poles of poison, being
pump
pump
pumped
into their veins.

All of them weary, and wishing not to be, “An inspiration.”

We follow the pedi onc to the private room. My face, now red,
warm from the fierce flames of my
pounding heart, as he tells us the cancer has returned, to the blood of the babe of my womb.



Lisa Molina is a writer/educator in Austin, Texas. She has three chapbooks forthcoming in 2022, and her poetry has been published in numerous print and online publications, including Beyond Words Magazine, Sparked Literary Magazine, Trouvaille Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Fahmidan Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Sledgehammer Literary Review.

Bad folks go to Hell when they die says my... by Gale Acuff

Sunday School teacher, she should know even
though she's not bad, not that I know of, she
works for God and the other Trinity
members, Jesus and the Holy Ghost, and
our church, too, plus she works for free and one
day I'll be a preacher because that will
always remind me of her but I'll get
paid for it, too, probably not much but
a parsonage to go with it and ours
is a mobile home but it's not so mo
-bile anymore, unless when Preacher prays
and no one's around it soars to Heaven
so I asked my teacher if that's so and
she gave me a dreamy smile, then said No.



Gale Acuff has published hundreds of poems in over a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine.

Lost Echo by Howie Good

On the airwaves
of memory floats

the voice of a child
chanting one one

thousand, two one
thousand, nothing

the least menacing
or even remarkable,

unless for you, just
as for me, the voice

lingers like the yellow
green of a faded bruise.



Howie Good is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest. It is scheduled for publication in summer 2022.

Haiku by Douglas J. Lanzo

crumpled newspaper

lining homeless man’s dreams
with stories of strangers



An award-winning and featured poet and novelist, 187 of Douglas J. Lanzo's poems have been published in 42 journals and 3 anthologies since 2020 across the U.S., Canada, England, Wales, Austria, India, Mauritius, Australia, Japan and the Caribbean. His Author’s Website (with poems, including by his twin sons) is located at https://douglaslanzo.com.