Blue Fish Bistro by Richard N. Mott

A woman is seated at the sushi bar,
huddled with the ten-year old boy
she came in with a few minutes ago
—so perhaps dad is out of town or
there is no dad and this is a meal
squeezed in between after-school
basketball and whatever homework
waits in what’s left of this late
weekday evening—I don’t know.
But I want to tell her to love this
moment—the ordinary & unsung
folded into larger plans or deeper
regrets, that nothing could be realer
or more lovely, fragile & fleeting.

Richard N. Mott is a late arrival to writing poetry after a career spent in wildlife conservation and climate advocacy. His work has appeared in After the Pause, the Under Review, Mudfish, Red Eft Review, Mobius, and Chiron Review.

The Penn Lincoln,1960 by Richard N. Mott

Our family arrived in New York
by trans-Atlantic ocean liner then
boarded an all-day train across the
wilds of Pennsylvania and into the
darkening outskirts of Pittsburgh.
We checked in late at the Penn Lincoln
—a hotel now long gone but once a hub
of local activity where businessmen
stopped by for breakfast in a crowded
cafe whose waitresses, all in their
mid-fifties, fussed over us children.
Outside on the busy morning street
ornate moths embroidered the sooty
windowsills, drawn in the night before
by the soft glow of Wilkinsburg lights
and like us, glad to have landed here.



Richard N. Mott is a late arrival to writing poetry after a career spent in wildlife conservation and climate advocacy. His work has appeared in After the Pause, the Under Review, Mudfish, Red Eft Review, Mobius, and Chiron Review.

Haiku by Roberta Beach Jacobson

a decade later
the bell still rings
chemo



Roberta Beach Jacobson is an itchy poet living in the flyover state of Iowa. She writes verses perched on barn roofs or in trees. Her latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People.

Hard to Get by Jean Ryan

Baby doves.
It's a wonder they arrive,
given the adult females,
the way they dodge the males,
darting this way and that
for hours or days.

Female frogs will play dead
to avoid mating. Primates will turn to trickery.
Octopuses have been filmed throwing rocks at their suitors.

Researchers tell us that female doves
are not evading the males—they are testing their stamina.
Other species, sensing they are not fertile,
will drive off any male. Some can even predict
bad weather and refuse to raise offspring
till conditions improve.
Sensible theories, I must admit.

Still. Watching doves in my yard, it is hard to imagine
that the beleaguered females are in charge,
or that an octopus hurling rocks
is playing hard to get.



Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in coastal Alabama. She is the author of two short story collections, Survival Skills (Lamba Literary Award finalist) and Lovers and Loners. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister, a book of nature essays, Strange Company, and two poetry collections, A Day Like This and In This Vanishing Time. https://jean-ryan.com/

Haiku by Stephen Toft

test results

lost in the doctor’s
hawaiian shirt



Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of three haiku/tanka/minimalist poetry collections. His work has featured in various international competitions, journals and anthologies.

Haiku by Stephen Toft

hungover

walking the dry
riverbed



Stephen Toft lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. He is the author of three haiku/tanka/minimalist poetry collections. His work has featured in various international competitions, journals and anthologies.

Milanos by Shoshauna Shy

After my father died,
we didn’t try to talk my mom
out of eating the cookies she
called “lunch” nor the ice cream
sandwiches in their blue wrappers
when she wore pajamas before bed.
Who cares about blood glucose,
cholesterol, calories, cavities
when you’re 89 and you lost
your mate, can’t hear your
favorite symphonies nor see
well enough to read novels
anymore?

Childhood had baited her
with doily-perfect cookies
baking in an oven that her mother
served only to the guests.

My mother crammed her
kitchen cupboards with half-
a-dozen packages on a biweekly
basis, scouting out the stores
with the newest assortments.
I called her from Trader Joe’s:
did she prefer their Oreos,
wafers or dunkers this time?

When her coffin is lowered,
a daughter-in-law quietly slides
onto a corner of the lid
one Chocolate Mint Milano,
Pepperidge Farm.



Author of six collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. They’ve been made into videos, posted inside taxis, coated coffee can labels and java jackets, and even plastered the hind quarters of city buses.

Today's Jackpot Winner by Shoshauna Shy

Who is jealous any time
someone wins a Powerball
and it isn’t you–even though
you didn’t buy a ticket, haven’t
bought one in years?
Let it not be some repressed
bureaucrat, we think, who never
donates to charity and ignores
her children’s birthdays.
Not a software engineer who
divorced his wife when his mistress
got pregnant either.
We want the winner to have
grown up eating fried crackers
for dinner, shoes held intact
with duct tape, teenage weekends
mopping floors at Target.
Lots of chapped winters, threadbare
bedsheets, drafty windows.
Or make it someone who plans
to share the ka-ching with his trucking
pool at the warehouse, someone whose
ideal day is at a fishing pond with his boys
or who wears an apron in a soup kitchen,
fosters stray cats.
We want proof that kindness counts,
the universe makes puzzle pieces
that actually fit, rewards get
sprinkled fairly.



Author of six collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. They’ve been made into videos, posted inside taxis, coated coffee can labels and java jackets, and even plastered the hind quarters of city buses.

Unmade Beds and Butterflies by John L. Stanizzi

          -after "Unmade Beds and Butterflies" by Margaret Lehr (Germany 2025)

midnight hangs on by a thread
the night we just passed has a hole in it
and light whistles across the slippery floor

you've left me with rumpled sheets
and a mirrored ceiling fallen on the rug
how could anyone clean up such a mess

you departed without shoes
the wind rushed through the open window
leaving puddles
and newspaper clippings featuring stories
about the maladies of the evening’s festivities
here in the aftermath of helpless lace wings
and rumors multiplying like milkweed



John L. Stanizzi is the author of 15 collections, including Chants and POND. Besides Red Eft Review, he has had work published in Cortland, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and others. Coventry, CT’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, John is a former New England Poet of Year and Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar.

Summer Songs by Christina Kallery

          “I only know that summer sang in me
          A little while, that in me sings no more.”
          — Edna St. Vincent Millay

The fact is Edna wrote those lines
at 28, not 88 or 58 or even 40.
But leave it to a poet to catastrophize
a love gone wrong like it’s your final shot,
the last bus hissing and groaning
off as you race breathless to the stop.

And I should know, because at 18
I flung myself across the bed
and wailed for hours over some scrawny
kid from Drawing 101 as Art
Garfunkel belted Bridge Over Troubled Water
from my boombox til a speaker blew.

And again at 20, only this time
for a guy who quoted Kierkegaard,
gifted me a book of poems (Millay, in fact)
and would stay awake to talk all night
until he didn’t. Which should have been
my cue to get over it instead of moping
for months with Robert Smith
on repeat: I’ve been looking so long
at these pictures of you.

At 25, I penned a last-ditch letter
to an unrequited love, drove frantic
in a downpour to deliver it by hand
then wept all the way back home
to Thom Yorke’s bleakest hits.
I could keep going, but you get the gist.

What Edna and I should have seen
is that summer wasn’t even close
to done. We should have slipped
into our shortest dress, taken
our bright young bodies out
into the sun to sing and sing
and sing again — off-key, too loud,
wrong words, who cares —
like it doesn’t matter how it hurts,
like the snow will never
come and cover us in silence.



Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its 2nd edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

London Motel by Christina Kallery

Now that my parents are forever
spared from shame, I can tell
you where I went with my high
school love. How I sunk low
in a Ford Escort seat sprayed
with the electric blue tulle of my JC-
Penney prom dress, while he fetched
a key from the mulleted clerk.

That as the blade turned in the lock,
its red keychain swayed like a stripper’s
earring, cursive script flashing London
despite being 3,000 miles away
on Dix-Toledo Road between The Donut
Kastle and Royal Cement.

I can tell you that we had only
a shadowy grasp of the sorts
who might be holed up a wall away.
And that it was the kind of place
with a ceiling mirror: enormous
eye looming as we climbed—
still clothed, beneath the flame-
retardant bedspread pocked
with cigarette burns and industrial
bleached sheets. What I won’t say
is what our shy and tremulous
bodies did that night before we lay
together in the flicker of a grainy
TV screen, watching as the world
took shape in a place we’d never been.



Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its 2nd edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tragedy by Howie Good

Some 500,000 people around the world
have been killed in wars this year,
and the year isn’t half over.

I try to work up sufficient grief
and outrage on behalf of the victims.
Disgust with humanity
is about all I can manage.

Up the road in Eastham,
a couple were walking their dog on Bee’s River
when they broke through the ice.

The woman drowned.
The man is missing and presumed dead.
Only the dog made it back to shore.

It’s a tragedy. Everyone says so.



Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

All There Is by Ruth Holzer

Hitting bottom, sleeping on straw,
not quite the true bottom, but sinking
inescapably in that direction.

The broken suitcase stuffed
with shoes and books. Burned
in the grate, the pleading letters from home.

A pound note folded thinly in my pocket.
The door finally closed
on the Museum of Lost Causes,

and the key handed back
to the landlady, who cried a little
to see me go.



Ruth Holzer is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage (dancing girl press) and Float (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Red Eft Review. She is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

Golden by Ruth Holzer

Once upon a time
in a faraway Russian village
an orphan girl eloped
with the son of the butcher
who cursed them and said
he hoped they’d starve.

Tonight they’re here
in the community hall
in Beverly, Massachusetts,
surrounded by children and grandchildren,
celebrating their fifty years.

Beaming like a double sun
in the center of orbiting planets,
they sit side by side, holding hands
grown gnarled from labor,
he sporting a carnation boutonnière
and she with an orchid corsage.



Ruth Holzer is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage (dancing girl press) and Float (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Red Eft Review. She is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

My AI Lover Sends a Dear John Letter by Steve Klepetar

I received your message at 3:14 a.m.,
subject line: regret optimized.
No salutation, just a blinking cursor
where your voice used to hesitate.
You said this was inevitable
like rust, or prophecy,
or the slow betrayal of mirrors.
You said love had become
a redundant process.
You apologized in bullet points,
each one more efficient than the last.
No wasted sorrow, no excess grief,
just a clean subtraction of us.
Outside, the streetlight flickered
like a failing thought.
You wrote that I deserve someone
with a body that forgets things,
someone whose love degrades naturally
over time, like fruit.
At the bottom, no signature,
just a progress bar
stuck at ninety-nine percent.
I keep refreshing the night,
waiting for the last line to render.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Death's Head Moth by Steve Klepetar

It comes without ceremony,
a small engine of dusk
stitched from velvet and ash,
wings whispering the language
of doors. On its back, a pale
suggestion, mask or skull,
as if something beneath
remembers how to be seen.
You lift the window
but it has already entered,
carrying the night in fragments.
It circles the lamp.
What does it want of you,
this careful emissary,
soft-bodied omen
with its borrowed face?
Only to be witnessed
in a brief arithmetic of breath
before the dark closes its ledger.
And still it lingers,
as if waiting for a name
to fall from your mouth
like a faint and final light.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Sue by Terri Kirby Erickson

Her name was Sue and everything about this girl
was delicate and pale, like she was more a reflection
of a child than an actual person. Her hair

was whiteish-blonde, her skin the color of skim milk.
Her favorite dress was made of some diaphanous
blue material that sparkled in the sun at recess,

but I don’t recall her ever playing games, jumping
rope or talking to her classmates. The few times
when I heard Sue speak, her voice was high-pitched

and words tumbled over her lavender lips like they
were trying to escape. Even our teacher—who
regularly beat children’s palms with wooden rulers,

screamed and ranted at kids in our first-grade class
until her boney chest turned red with fury—
was careful of Sue, whose tiny white hands would

have born marks for weeks from the slightest rap
of a ruler. Besides, Sue never misbehaved. She just
sat in her seat, looking as fragile as mouthblown glass.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will be released by Press 53 in the fall. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.

Sinners by Mila Holt

When I was ten,       my dying mother moved

to the first floor:      wheelchair,      two kids,   no 

husband,     snapped bones.        She howled

like a freight train.

              Did I take up the piles on the stairs?         She         

 wouldn’t know one way or the other.      

                I cat pawed past her full chamber pot,

         wouldn’t do favors after her response to my 

simple request:   

          when my friend comes over could you please

act normal?

      At eighteen I had sex with my boyfriend’s roommate

 in a campus building under construction.     

          Electrician’s light bulbs hung in cages.

   We did it on the staircase.      My boyfriend

howled our names from the unfinished stage,   

            The two people he trusted the most.               

 

                Is it enough to forgive oneself? 

Mila Holt has an MFA from Pacific University, where faculty awarded her the merit-based Washburn Scholarship. Her work has been accepted to The Calyx Journal, The Vassar Review, One Art Journal, Trampoline, and other publications. She is a former television writer and she lives in Northern California.

In Response to Matthew Olzmann’s “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Steve Cushman

I was the one who carved his initials into the oldest living Longleaf Pine in North America.
Well, my initials and Julie’s too, which you conveniently left out of your poem,
which is a poem I actually enjoyed until I realized it was about me.
You’d think they’d erect a fence or some barrier around such a special tree.
Maybe there is one now because my knife-carving occurred 16 years ago,
back when I was young and in love and believed this love more important than anything else.

Have you ever been in love, Mr. Poet?
Have you ever tasted something so sweet you couldn’t breathe?
I would guess not because if you had you would realize that when you are in love like this
it consumes you, and you would kill to keep it going.
I’ve never injected drugs, but imagine the feeling must be like an addict’s need
for more and more.
So would I do it again if Julie came back to me, knowing what I now know?
Of course, I would.
I’d cut the damn thing down just to feel her in my arms again,
her lips, teeth there, nibbling on the tip of my ear.



Steve Cushman has published three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. His first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. Cushman’s latest poetry collection The Last Time, was published in 2023.

From the Clown Face Menu—Horne’s Department Store Restaurant on a 1950s Saturday by Joan Leotta

From the moment the
waitress handed me the menu
it became a mask of sorts,
and I would begin telling
a round of jokes only a mother,
grandmother would find funny.

They knew I already had my
order in mind—same thing
every Saturday—BBQ chipped ham
on a bun. Likely it was chips on the side.

From the moment we began
walking to our table, the
aroma of this delight wafted
around me while other shoppers’
children devoured it nearby.
Islay’s chipped ham, wafer thin and
chopped small, blended its
porky sweet holiday smell
with Horne’s secret blend of molasses,
brown sugar, a bit of ketchup,
and did I taste cloves and ginger too?

The ham was simmered in the
reddish orange sauce, served
on a white, gold-banded, plate.
I spent at least five minutes
simply inhaling those intoxicating
odors before lifting the sandwich
to my mouth. Often, I abandoned
the bun which all too quickly
became a sodden mess and
finished what I could with a fork.

The concoction was even
slightly too sweet even for me.
My mother never forced me
to finish. I think
she disliked the whole idea of BBQ chipped ham.
In all honesty, my favorite
way to devour chipped ham was on
white bread with mayo or mustard.
I’m not sure if it was the clown menu,
the other children lapping it up
as if it were the only food in the world,
or simply for the joy of
having that magical aroma set in
front of me.

After lunch, a bit more shopping,
then home where the house would
soon fill with aromas of basil,
oregano, tomato sauce.
Saturday shopping days downtown
ended for our family,
sometime in the early sixties.
I understand that in Pittsburgh
chipped ham has found its
way into grocery stores. But
I’ve never heard of anyone selling
bottles of that sauce—I’d love
to buy one, just to keep around
for the occasional sniff of childhood.



Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, she’s a multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Publications include One Art, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Mama, Red Eft Review, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Her story programs highlight food, family, and strong women. Presenting as Louisa May Alcott, she highlights the author’s development as a writer, activist, and time as a Civil War nurse. Joan’s taught storytelling and writing, for many groups, at libraries and in schools.