Reaching for the sky just to surrender by Doug Holder

          After "The Stranger Song" by Leonard Cohen

A gambler has a religion,
his tired dogma
that God is behind him
with every roll
of the pockmarked dice.

He will clasp
his hands
above his head
and realize that
it is not in the
cards for him.

Some errant Jack-of Hearts
will break his own.

His racing forms a desert
of defeat.

Our man will continue to look up
at the blue sky
raise his fists
like a mad King Lear

and surrender...



Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, and former co-president of the New England Poetry Club. He teaches at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

The Comedian by Terri Kirby Erickson

No longer young, he paces back and forth
across the comedy club stage with the sort
of limping walk people associate with un-
funny things, yet he is hilarious. No matter
what story he’s telling—about his family,
his friends, his car, or his cat—the audience
laughs. It’s like he invented the word comedy
and the jesters who came after him are pale
reflections of the real thing. Neither hand-
some nor plain, his clothes nondescript, his
shoes a bit dusty, you wouldn’t know him if
you saw him on the street five minutes after
the show. But as long as he’s moving his lips
and holding that microphone in his hand like
a fool’s bauble, this aging funnyman with his
thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, makes
you forget all your troubles and worries, your
petty squabbles, and disappointments. He’s
saying it’s not so bad, folks, and you believe
him. In fact, you feel a loosening of the knots
in your chest as you laugh and laugh, so much
so that when the comedian says goodnight and
exits the stage, you feel nearly weightless, as
if you might float to the ceiling like a helium
balloon. But his step grows heavier when he
leaves the building and drives to that cheap
motel too close to the highway where he takes
his blood pressure pill with a swig of bourbon
and calls his wife of thirty-five years just to say,
I miss you like crazy, Honey. I’ll be home soon.



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

After Catastrophe by Spencer K. M. Brown

There’s a place I drive to while getting our boys to sleep.
A place they clear-cut years back but I guess forgot to make something of.

I’ve never taken you there, but I’d like to,
Last night I dreamed of it, all of us there.

The field is plush with wild golden flowers now, random when passing,
But I parked today, and they’re in even rows actually.

Nothing random or chaotic about it, except the bees and butterflies
Bouncing from here to there as instinct beckons them.

There’s always an act after catastrophe, silent,
Like the one made by whoever sowed these seeds among ravaged earth.

One after another, the golden rows in couplets among scarred clay.
One following the other, satisfying one moment, promising another on powdered wings.

And that’s what you give me, our boys, neat rows for now,
Hope for tomorrow, with everything that can fly dancing in between.

And I’ll never not blush at your golden gaze, or when you try to balance on me.
I’ll try to move in rows for you, one into the next.



Spencer K. M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one collection of stories, Slow Fire. He lives in the foothills of North Carolina with his wife and three sons. The Salvation of Me is his first book-length collection of poems.

At the Bard College Cemetery by Howie Good

It was hidden behind a screen of trees,
an old rural cemetery I discovered one day

while trying to outwalk my loneliness,
the gray limestone headstones stained,

tilted, cracked, subsiding into the earth
in what seemed an admission of defeat,

names and dates eroded, illegible,
the dead forgotten by all except me,

who would go there for the stillness
and the silence and the company.



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

Maclura Pomifera by Frederick Wilbur

          for Elizabeth, eighty years on

October angles the sun
in a relieving beauty,
creeks are lean,
fields of soybeans browning.

After the equinox,
several Osage oranges
roll from the fencerow tree,
yellow-green knobbles
in the ragged grass.

For years, I count them
as my grandfather did
at his gray house in Connecticut.

These several are the harbingers
of perhaps twenty or more
to be gathered into bucket
or wheelbarrow.

They seem a fortuitous harvest
like those lucks I save for winter,
useful beyond their beauty.

As long as I am able,
now in my aches and forgettings,
I will tally them
to measure the years
and throw them into woods
with a boy’s glee.



Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, The Heft of Promise and the forthcoming Is to Say. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).

Runoff by Richard Weaver

We ran behind the mosquito trucks
because the spray cooled our summer
bodies. For us it was a game, a relief
from the monotony of summer’s dry river.
An edge of our earth we could understand.
The oily air no different than the shiny runoff
we watched coursing down the gutter
on those rare days when it dared rain.
Both were opportunities to play. We knew
less than our parents who knew nothing about
chemical consequences. A marriage made in
fill-in-your-blank. My lungs exchanged for yours?
My kidneys something my siblings could accept?
We are the collateral damage of the ongoing
experimental generations. The sad participants
who had no idea. No clue. And can only wait.



Richard Weaver was an Assistant Professor at the 3rd oldest Jesuit College where he taught in the English Department and was the Head of Library Circulation, and acting Archivist. His first published poem appeared in Poetry Magazine in April of 1975. His 600th poem was recently published in Red Eft Review. Other publications and his mugshot as a Rat Poet available upon request. (Mug not available.)

Pallbearer by Richard Weaver

The weight remains
in my hands, that first
uncalloused memory
of death known.
My father’s father
gone to grave, to dust
but not ashes.
The first time
I’d been asked,
honored, I knew then
and now, to help carry
a strong man to grave.
A large man shrunken
by life, outweighed by grief
and the constant pain
of shingles. My two brothers
and me, my father
and his one leg gamely
helping us carry his father
more memory than man,
making our slow way
to the graveside
where Truitt would lay.
Ninety-three years
pushing down on his shoulders.
My grandmother’s hand as well,
gripping his hand in death in life,
and not surprised by the strength.
Not giving in, not letting go
or crying Uncle as we did
when he squeezed our hands
at age 80. At 90. His strength
mythic but real. His life
a beautiful envy I’ll always have.



Richard Weaver was an Assistant Professor at the 3rd oldest Jesuit College where he taught in the English Department and was the Head of Library Circulation, and acting Archivist. His first published poem appeared in Poetry Magazine in April of 1975. His 600th poem was recently published in Red Eft Review. Other publications and his mugshot as a Rat Poet available upon request. (Mug not available.)

Privacy by Martha Christina

Out for a walk
with her dog
and her phone,
the woman who
wakes me, telling
intimate details of an
argument with her
partner, doesn’t know
or seem to care that
she’s overheard.

As children, my sisters
and I were schooled in
keeping secrets, careful
not to share with even
our best friends what
went on in our family:
our mother’s daily
violence, spilling out
when least expected.
Even now to speak
of details seems a risk,
so when people ask
where I come from, I
joke about the Midwest.



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.

A Season of Nests by Michael Brockley

Young robins have woven a hag’s wig into their first nest on the platform of my front porch downspout. When I leave the house through the front door, the female flees to the wire fence along the sidewalk. Then to either a low branch on a redbud or a higher vantage on a nearby silver maple. She scolds me with a beautiful song, a morning greeting of sorts, even during the middle of the day. I choose the long way to walk around her ragged nest. I cannot see young chicks yet. And I rarely hear birdsong, with these muffled ears, anymore. But I keep watch for the father, who is alert and close, as I retrieve the mail or set out for a trek of a mile or two. Whenever the mother stays on her nest as I appear on my front porch, I whisper to her. Asking her to name a daughter after my dog, Sadie. Telling her there are no red-tailed hawks in the sky or warning her of danger if she needs to be wary. For a month, I will be an uncle. To the ancestor of a creature with hollow bones made of flutes.



Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in AGNI Online and Blue Fire and are forthcoming in Gargoyle Online and Bay to Ocean Journal. Brockley's first full collection of prose poems, Iron Pennies, will be released in September.

A Round of Miniature Golf by Russell Rowland

The child of my child confides—
lots of back-handed talking goes on at school,

unfounded whispers of broken friendships.

Is she less a girl
because she does not choose to wear makeup,
the way Antonia does?

Is Antonia really a friend at all?
What about the looming regional high school?

We putt our way around the course—
its eighteen stages of life. This year she keeps
more under par than Grampy—

I can’t seem to foresee the obstacles ahead.

I only know
the final eighteenth hole gives nothing back.



Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust trail volunteer Russell Rowland writes poems when he gets home.

Rain. Rainbow. Children of God by David E. Poston

It is a brand-new box of sidewalk chalk,
carried by a five-year-old girl who wandered
across the road into the parking lot of the abandoned
Cinderella Knitting Mill at dusk while her parents
were playing spades with their best friends
around the kitchen table.

Prying a door loose from its rotting frame
has saved the man a five-mile walk in the rain
to the Salvation Army shelter, but he is still numb
enough with cold to risk a small fire. Outside,
the clouds have moved east, and just as he starts
to feel his fingers again, something catches his eye
through the mill’s bleared window-panes, arcs of
pink and blue sweeping across the concrete
of the parking lot as if drawn by an invisible hand.
Her pale nightdress blends that well into the dusk.

He’s sober tonight, more or less, so what is he seeing?
He picks up a smoldering stick, and steps outside
for a closer look, just as the girl’s mother senses she is gone.

So beautiful, he says out loud. An angel is
bending over a rainbow. The girl looks up
to see the red tip’s glow floating above her head.



David E. Poston is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Letting Go (Fernwood Press, 2026). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Garfield Lake Review, Bull, North Carolina Literary Review, and Kakalak, among others.

Milo's by Dale Wisely

A woman is in the parking lot
of a Milo's Hamburger joint
wearing a red uniform tee,
two minutes before her shift.

She hugs another woman
who has dropped her off.
They break the long hug
and both wipe away tears.
The employee turns and gets halfway

to the door, but turns back,
rushes up to the other woman,
and they hug again, this time
both shaking with sobs.

This moment,
even separated from all others,
is the reason for the air,
for water, for gravity,
for the tilting and turning of the earth.



Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, which publishes Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken Journal, first frost, Unlost Journal, and The Scarred Tree: Poems on Moral Injury. With Katherine DiBella Seluja he co-edited Memento: An Anthology Memento: An Anthology of Poems on Grief (2025). His upcoming book of poems, A Book of Saturdays, is due out from Seed Bed Press in September 2026.

Pinwheel Sandwiches by Terri Kirby Erickson

Many years ago, while traveling, we stopped
at a Kroger in Connecticut. We bought a tray

of pinwheel sandwiches rolled in flour tortillas
and filled with thin layers of medium-rare roast

beef and mayonnaise, perhaps a bit of lettuce
as I recall, and provolone cheese, sliced in bite-

sized rounds. We ate them in the car, watching
people pull into parking spots and head into the

the store, others pushing buggies brimming with
bags of groceries. And I must admit my husband

and I have eaten delightful lunches all over the
world, some prepared by the finest chefs—meals,

even in Paris, that I have mostly forgotten. But
I can still taste those pinwheel sandwiches, how

cold and refreshing they were on a warm day—
how much better I felt when my hunger was so

deliciously assuaged before we eased into traffic,

my husband’s hands on the steering wheel, the

two of us facing forward as if time would never
chase us down, our future brighter than the sun.



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.

Dishes to Die For by Sandi Leibowitz

Roz heaps her famous baked apples
into Tupperware,
Charlotte presses me to deliver
whitefish salad on challah,
Jean offers chocolate biscotti
and I drive off for pizza, bagels,
a Subway tuna sandwich,
to entice my dying mother
to eat, eat.

Instead, she has me play the hostess,
serve coffee to her guests,
quarter the giant sub
and grant it piecemeal to the nurses.

For days she’s laughingly admitted that
what she could really go for
is a Coney Island hot dog
with mustard and sauerkraut.

I finally find the only Nathan’s
in West Palm Beach
and enter hospice bearing triumph
in a paper take-out bag.

She takes one bite
and asks,
“What flavor ice-cream is this?
Pineapple?”

Over dinner at the Jewish deli,
Jean tells me how as a girl
my mother would hoard her bus fare
so she could buy a Nathan’s hot dog.
She always got in trouble,
mustard stains on her blouse
giving her away.

I picture her now as that young girl
striding through Brooklyn streets,
eating life.



Sandi Leibowitz is the author of three poetry collections: Ghost-Light, Eurydice Sings, and The Bone-Joiner. Her speculative poems have won second- and third-place Dwarf Stars, as well as nominations for the Elgin, Rhysling, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. She invites you to visit her at www.sandileibowitz.com (http://www.sandileibowitz.com)

Self-Inventory at Seventy by Jacqueline Jules

I miss
spicy foods and caffeine past noon.
A back that doesn’t ache at night.
Hands strong enough to open a pickle jar.
Eyes sharp enough to read small print.
Driving at night.
Mornings without medications.
Smooth skin minus age spots.

I don’t miss
the chemical odor of hair dye.
Tampons. Shaving my legs.
High heels. Tight dresses.
Rising for an 8 a.m. commute.
Running errands on my lunch break.
Office politics. Endless emails.
Juggling children and elderly parents.
Rushing through dinner and chores.
Never having enough sleep.
Always wanting more.
Not feeling fierce joy
in being alive another day.



Jacqueline Jules is the author of The Golden Key to the Garden (Bottlecap Press, 2026), Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023).

The Title is "Title" by Todd Mercer

The password is “password,” which I guessed quickly,
because that’s mine too. Who can remember
random digits to thwart hackers? The hackers get in,
every try, regardless of defensive measures. Meanwhile
I am HIPPA’ed out of my own patient file. I’m stumped
on my ATM PIN. Had it, lost it, changed it, had it…
Lost it. Stayed in stasis ‘til that settled out.
The safe-word has been “safe-word,” so daringly literal
since it’s of key importance not to blank on that one.
Maybe we’re not wild, compared to free-wheelin’ people
from the news cycle, from movies. The key word
is “keyword,” [no space]. Self-reflective
so we won’t forget it, this figurative lynch-pin,
this interstitial Velcro of human relations.
The word is “word.” Dig me?
The less said on that, the better.



Todd Mercer writes fiction and poetry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His collection, Ingenue, was published by Celery City Press. His short work, Life-wish Maintenance, can be read at Right Hand Pointing. Recent work appears in The Confluence Anthology, Literally Stories and the Michigan Bards Poetry Anthology.

Flight of the Bee by Howie Good

“Want to know a fact?” my young grandson asked,
and without waiting for me to respond, added,
“Bees can’t fly in the rain.” Later I looked up online
if that’s true. It actually is. Even a single raindrop
can knock a bee out of the air or damage its wings.
Bees very sensibly stay in the hive when it rains.
I’m neither steadfast nor brave. My life is ordinary
to the point of dreariness. But given the chance,
I for one might risk the rain to bask inside a flower.



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

Untitled by Peter Jastermsky

watching a plane
break the horizon

all those
letters
once thought lost

were never sent



A New England native, Peter Jastermsky lives among the Joshua trees in Southern California. He is the author of twelve books of haiku-based work. To learn more, please go to peterjastermsky.com.

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.