Painting by M. Benjamin Thorne

I think my father secretly
wanted to be a painter;
he’d talk about retirement,
stock market pressures behind him,
and buying paints and canvas, maybe.
His once-thought-lost high school art,
preserved in framed collages, featured
dazed Don Quixotes, weeping Vietnam vets.
It’s odd to think about, the armors he donned
at various points to suit his need: leather jacket
for the street trouble-seeker; varsity coat
in football season; smock for art class;
pin-stripes and tie for Merrill Lynch.
The last he wore longest, and heaviest
I think. But when you come dirt poor
from West Virginia to Wall Street, you need
some heraldry to prove you belong,
some shield against ridicule and scorn.

Mornings meant shined shoes and tied knots;
evenings a collapse into silence and cigarette haze,
his ironed shirt and Brooks Brothers shorn
for sweats and crinkled newspaper wall.
Sometimes his eyes peered over the crenelation,
and rarely, defenses lowered, I’d see a smile—
and what beautiful vistas that simple stretch
of tired muscles sketched in my eager heart.



M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Griffel, The Westchester Review, Rising Phoenix Review, Feral, Gyroscope Review, and Molecule. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.

Wren by John L. Stanizzi

a wren solos
where the offering of daybreak
brightens the road

and as the day
returns to heat
the bird’s music is sewn
into the branches
like lace
so delicate
it cannot be seen



John L. Stanizzi is the author 15 collections and has published in over 200+ journals, including Red Eft Review several times. You can find him in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, VIA, and others. His nonfiction is in Stone Coast, Metaworker, etc. John is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College, and in 2021, he received a Connecticut Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction from the Connecticut Office of Arts. His piece, "Pants," was named “Best of 2021” by Potato Soup Journal.

Shadow of the Gun by Howie Good

Video from the school shooting in Georgia
was playing with the sound off on the TV
behind the counter at the convenience mart.
“Have a good one,” the cashier rotely said,
handing me my change. I was still thinking
about the school shooting as I turned to leave.
The next customer in line towered above me,
a big, strong-looking guy in t-shirt and jeans
and with a six-pack of Bud Light tucked under
his thick right arm. Across the front his shirt
declaimed “Protect Gun Rights” in red, white,
and blue. I confess to it all as I would a crime.



Howie Good is a retired professor living on Cape Cod. His new poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Sweet Dreams by Jean Ryan

Because of backyard fledglings,
because of ferals and snakes and ticks,
I keep my cat inside, where his cupped ears are tuned
not to the scuttle of a mouse but to the lid of his cat food,
where his night vision leads him not through deep woods
but around a monotony of furniture,
where his claws and fangs and whiskers
are only ornamentation.
Each day he sits at the back door, tail flapping,
and studies through the terminus of glass
the squirrels he will never chase,
the birds he will never kill.

Which is why I love to watch him dream.
Stretched alongside me, I see his paws twitch,
his muzzle crimp, the fur on his spine lift up.
In sleep he breaks free of my world
and finds another, some marvelous labyrinth
where small warm beings tremble in burrows
and unknowing birds peck at the ground.
Like a ribbon he moves toward the smell
of meat, he can already taste the blood.
And waiting there too is a willing mate,
ready each time he nods off.

My house is where he shelters.
Sleep is where he lives.



Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in coastal Alabama. She has published two short story collections, Survival Skills and Lovers and Loners. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister, a book of nature essays, Strange Company, and a poetry collection, A Day Like This. https://jean-ryan.com/

The Winter I Wore My Mother’s Coat by Marianne Szlyk

That fall my friend told me that Marilyn

had been size sixteen, Fifties’ curves too large
for the Eighties in Boston. There bone-thin
women earned MBAs, wore strings of pearls;
slight girls danced all night to the Talking Heads.

That year I borrowed Mom’s old coat to wear
on the subway to class. I’d risk coffee,
oil paint, turpentine stains on night-blue wool,
fur cuffs soft against my wrists. I was size
sixteen like Marilyn, like Mom’s old coat.

Mom said she hated to think of her coat
riding the subway, wandering the streets.
Her coat, her smart coat she’d bought at Denholm’s
with her first paychecks to walk to St. Luke’s
when the priest, back to all, still spoke Latin.

If she knew, if she’d seen me wear her coat
as I followed Mike Green around Boston,
she’d be furious. Then the lining tore.
I thought nothing of it. I could not sew.
Light snow turned to rain. Cars splashed her coat.

Spring came. Mom discarded my winter coat
like high school diaries, Janis Joplin
LPs, my thin, hippie skirts. I should have
brought Mom’s old coat to the cleaners to fix
the lining at least. There were dry cleaners

on each corner, even near campus
to fix the coat I had not bought, the coat
I had stolen just to feel like someone,
not a fat girl, not a drab girl in art class.



Marianne Szlyk's poems have appeared in Green Elephant and One Art. Her stories are in Mad Swirl and Impspired. Her book Why We Never Visited the Elms is available on Amazon.

The Spider, and the Web by Kelley White

Another prison mark, like the teardrop
and the clock, it can weave over elbow,
knee, nape of neck, belly, back. It might be
nothing more than graphic, part of a sleeve,
or vest, but it may mean prison—see
that boy lifting his baby to his shoulder,
that man pulling a woman to his side
by her hair. So tell me, where
is the spider. All, she’s a female.
She’s a black widow, her hourglass
emptying fast through her narrow waist;
watch out for her sweet lethal kiss.



Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent collection is NO. HOPE STREET (Kelsay Books). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Waitress with a Chance of Death by Heidi Slettedahl

The flight attendant read through the entire bumpy flight.
A thick book, not easy to carry on a plane.
Perhaps she got extra luggage,
a certain benefit for being a waitress with a chance of death.

She never served us on the flight.
The pilot told her to remain seated.
But she stood instead, her back to us.
A sort of defiance I admired, if simultaneously abhorred.

What is poetry if not a transcription of the world made more beautiful?



Heidi Slettedahl is an academic and a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. She has been published in a variety of online literary journals. She is the author of Mo(u)rning Rituals (Kelsay Books, 2024).

My Childhood is Strange to Me by Heidi Slettedahl

We didn’t think it macabre

to have a rabbit’s foot in our pocket,
to stroke it against our palm or face.

We played with cap guns and candy cigarettes.
Our mothers never knew where we were.

Once I almost drowned in our neighbor’s pool.
I told no one, fearful I’d never be allowed to swim again.

We found Hustler and Playboy in the woods,
crumpled and torn and sticky with sap.

A man kissed me in the parking lot near our house.
I didn’t take the five dollars he offered me.

I was afraid of ghosts and being buried alive.
I didn’t know what else to fear.



Heidi Slettedahl is an academic and a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. She has been published in a variety of online literary journals. She is the author of Mo(u)rning Rituals (Kelsay Books, 2024).

What We Carry by Joseph Mills

A family of five, we trailered
a pop-up tent on highways
all around the country,
camping in state parks,
picnicking in rest areas.
It was how we could afford
to go anywhere. Each of us
had a beer case in which
we could put whatever
we needed or wanted.
Clothes, toiletries, snacks.
I filled mine with comic books,
choosing to wear the same outfit
for an entire trip to make room
for Archie, Batman, Casper,
Richie Rich, the Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, Tales from the Crypt,
Two Fisted War Stories, and
I would read for mile after mile
after mile after mile after mile.

Annoyed, my father would say,
Put those damn comic books down
and look out the window.
You may never be here again!
I would glance up to see
some mountain or forest or
tourist attraction, say “nice,”
then go back to reading.
Years later, I hear his voice
in mine as I tell my children
to get off their phones
and Look at that! Look! Look!

I understand my father now,
his desire for us to be present,
but I was traveling elsewhere
as we crossed Ohio or Nebraska.
Before I ever heard of multi-verses,
I knew what they were. They were
stacked in that beer case. They were
pages and panels. They were worlds
made by words and images. They were
stories we travelled with and in, ones
we needed more than clothes or food.



Joseph Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published several collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Bodies in Motion: Poems About Dance.

Anywhere But Here by Russell Rowland

A young couple, new to the trail,
were both appreciative of our advisories—

what lay ahead, the footing, the elevation gain,
one inconvenient newly-fallen tree—

while an older woman behind them—mother
to one, mother-in-law
to the other?—glared icicles in our direction,

as if reaching deep

into a repository of resentments, long saved up,
against the day—the effort—us.

We shook our heads afterward:
high mileage on our hiking boots, each of us
aware that the only mishaps

we ever had on a mountain
happened on days we were mad at the world,

and wished we were somewhere else.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

A Tour of the Cellar Holes by Russell Rowland

Some day after black-fly season,

but before it snows, I will take those interested
to Ossipee Glen to see the cellar holes:

labor of hands established—then, completed,
left for earth to swallow up again.

I will not moralize—

just study the faces of those who cared to come,
as they consider work

they themselves have done or left undone.

Once they’ve seen it all,
thought it over for themselves, I’ll lead them back

to the hiker’s parking lot—

from which they will go home, a few may realize,
to no continuing city.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Route 9W by Christine Potter

doesn’t take you where it did: to scarlet
picnic tables under green neon at Annie’s
Snack Shack and tall bottles of beer icy-
wet as bare-handing snowballs. To onion

rings on sheets of red and white wax paper
in plastic baskets. Hoyer’s bright old sign
with the four-foot-high soft-serve cone has
unplugged its electric buzz, and this road’s

lost itself to no place special: nail salons,
gun shops, chain drug stores faced in fake
antique brick. The summer cottages down
by Rockland Lake are winterized or gone,

front porches masked-up in vinyl siding, AC
blasting the breath of weary ghosts. We’re
all of us tired: beyond fireflies, not ready for
crickets. We all need a vacation and nobody

takes much of one anymore, not here. No
dads down in Manhattan send the wife and
kids up the Hudson for open windows and
music echoing from a lakeside dance hall—

music that could inspire anyone to grow up
and want that fun, that fun exactly. It didn’t
work out that way. We went out for a drive—
hey, anyone would have—and ended up here.



Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in Tar River and Grain. Her poems have recently been in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Cloudbank, ONE ART, and featured on ABC Radio News. She's the author of the young adult series The Bean Books, and her latest poetry collection, on Kelsay Books, is Unforgetting.

Birds of Slow Motion by Frederick Wilbur

Uncle Morris stowed his wooden canoe
in the rafters of grandmother’s garage,
upside down as if floating on the depth
of apex, a doubt on spiritual mystery.

As a ten-year old, the ribs seemed
a fence against darkness, or a whale’s
cavern: something I’d never seen before.

Of the float, it was stranded.
It was waiting.

My uncle did not want to be a lawyer,
would take cousins and cousins
to the Sound to swim,
to picnic at Fairfield Beach Club.

For me, the canoe remained paddleless
all my years growing up
like memories that wait for their time,
vultures of intention slow to finalize meaning.



Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work appears in The Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, Red Eft Review, and Shenandoah. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize by Midwest Quarterly (2018).

O Cache Luxurious by Lisa L. Moore

This is a summer memory: that’s why
my feet were bare. Helen’s head was round,
her forehead high and pale, her blue eyes meek.
Her English parents did not speak fluent
sunscreen, so that day her face, scarlet
and swollen, caused her pain. The goal back then
was burn, peel, bronze, suntan. My olive skin
tanned easily beneath my thick brown bangs.
A tan was said to be my one beauty,
so I was ungreased, unprotected too.

We had discovered treasure in the lane
behind her house: O cache luxurious!
Pale grey cement rectangles, no doubt
destined for construction in our raw
new neighborhood. Like toybox blocks, and free!
we thought. We’d build ourselves a playhouse.
Brick by brick, we carried what we’d need,
in four-year-old fingers, one girl on
each end, across the street and into my
backyard. We couldn’t mess up Helen’s yard,
we knew. Her parents were the only ones
scarier than mine.

          I used to start this story at the end,
when Helen dropped her side and broke my toe.
We grew up with injuries like this, and others,
mostly secret. As the harbor opens out
today on Pearl Street, the screen slides back.
I glimpse anew. We were making something,
fingers slipping, eyes on one another.



Lisa L. Moore is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, as well as the poetry chapbook, 24 Hours of Men. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Waxing and Waning, Nimrod International Journal, and Hairstreak Butterfly Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Dad, too, had been a child of deprivation by David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton

He is a traveling salesman child
of the Great Depression who,
thank God, stopped traveling
(much) by the time I was 13.

Before him Pap-Pap, a jovial giant,
had been an overseer for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The boys at the firehall he & Dad had floored one summer
appreciated his largesse.

“Another round for everyone!” he’d boom.

Na-Na, slight as a rail
& rail tie sturdy,
sent Dad as a boy
into bars after Pap-Pap

to try to get him
to come home
before his paycheck was spent—

David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton is proud to appear again in Red Eft Review. His work has also been in Lothlórien Poetry Journal, Poem Alone, and dadakuku.com. He and his family enjoy dogs, good food, good friends, each other, and travel.

Reassurance by Martha Christina

My old cat yowls
loud and long
into the dark.

My sympathetic vet
explains: She wakes
disoriented, uncertain
of where she is, where
you are. You can let her
know, reassure her.

In those first months
when I was learning
my new identity: widow,
half-asleep I sometimes
felt my husband’s weight
against my back. Waking
fully, I’d find this same cat
curled in that space, as if
she could reassure me.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Hot Water by Martha Christina

Widowed and childless,
he married again; his
second wife, my aunt,
also childless, a
professional woman
before that term was
used. Past child-bearing
age, they lavished
affection and attention
on other people’s children
and on each other. Their
favorite drink: hot
water, with a splash
of top milk, a scant
teaspoon of sugar

added to each cup.
Comfortable, they were
also well-past the rural
poverty they’d worked
their way out of. Even
so, with Starbucks
within our means,
as they liked to say,
they drank hot water,
grateful for every
sweetened swallow.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Practicing by Martha Christina

Today the fledged finches
are on their own, practicing
how to feed themselves,
how to fly. The females
dominate the feeder, filling
all six perches, trading places
before the males can land.

Two males practice flight
between the rose canes,
and the wisteria, then cling
to the kitchen window screen,
resting their young wings.

They’re in no danger, ignored
by my old cat, who’s practicing
the sleep she has perfected.



Martha Christina has published two collections: Staying Found (Fleur-de-lis Press) and Against Detachment (Pecan Grove Press). Her work appears in earlier issues of Red Eft Review, and recently in Star 82 Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tiny Seed Journal. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Royal Crown by Linda Parsons

As my grandfather’s handkerchiefs stiffened
on the line, she filled a used Royal Crown bottle,
sometimes Dr. Pepper (those sugar tits we craved
at ten, two, and four), to dampen the squares
embroidered with an M for Mac or McClanahan.
I begged nickels to help, aimed the shaker top
at each curled corner. Heat puffed from the iron’s
silver prow, cotton’s thin skin pressed to the board.
Her airless kitchen, a warmth that evaporated
when I left their house. People say more stars
in her crown for this or that goodness, and it’s true—
she wouldn’t leave him, no matter how many
amber highboys he slid to the side of his chair.
Through the steam, I counted a thousand or more.



Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Day at the Beach by Terri Kirby Erickson

Slathered with suntan lotion and sitting
under a Shibumi, my husband and I along
with two of our dear friends—all of us

over sixty-five—ate our lunch. Pimento
cheese and turkey sandwiches, potato chips
and chocolate pound cake, made for a grand

picnic as we sweltered in the heat, pressed
bottles of cold water against our sweaty
foreheads. Adding our ailments together,

we’ve had cancer and a heart attack, high
cholesterol and a movement disorder, each
of us taking daily medication. So be it. We

still looked good, if a bit shopworn, in our
beach attire, including billed hats and bare
legs—white, brown, or freckled. Look at

that, we said a few times while watching
people of all ages do whatever it was they
were doing. There was a lumbering little boy

wearing a thickly padded life jacket, loads
of nearly naked teenagers, and tattoos galore
on both firm and sagging flesh. Couples

strolled by and mothers with babies, dads
with more hair on their legs than their heads.
Most people were stationary, like us, parked

beneath their umbrellas and Shibumis, music
blaring, beverages in hand, soaking up sounds
of the sea, the white-hot glare, and a cloudless

sky the color of blue jeans washed a thousand
times. And despite the occasional temper tan-
trums of hot and tired children, the screaming

gulls fighting over bits of stale bread, and the
blistering heat, we were content to breathe the
humid air and brave those soaring temps for

a few carefree hours with the friends we have
known for years, talking or not talking—just
watching the world go by. We were happy

to be alive on a sunny summer day that will
never come again—but could shine through
the scrim of a poem long after we are gone.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven collections of award-winning poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), a finalist for the International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” Rattle, The SUN, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others.