The Artist Takes Down Her Show in Which Not a Single Painting Sold by Shoshauna Shy

and pauses between hauling canvases
across the rough floorboards to watch
from the doorway as a bus brakes
at the curb outside, exhales and lowers
itself to discharge a passenger.
Wordlessly, a young woman in cut-offs
and sandals, handbag swinging, leaps
from the vehicle and strides away.
The bus lifts itself back into position
like an elephant coming out of a kneel,
lumbering on to do this thankless job
at the next stop, and the next.



Shoshauna Shy's poems have been made into videos, produced inside taxi cabs, and even decorated the hind quarters of city buses. Not a monogamous writer, she works on 7-11 pieces at the same time. She is also a flash fiction author— but that's another story!

Playground by Shoshauna Shy

Substitute teachers are never
as good as the originals.
They forget names, rely
on notes, glance at the clock
too much.

And then that word chosen.
When it’s from a batch of discards,
how special is that?
And don’t forget: chosen once
means not chosen a bunch
of other times.

Stand-in. Who were you expecting?
What ghost am I competing with?

The word real.
All the kids who ask
“Is she your real mom?”
I want to bark, “No, she’s fake.
She’s pretending. So am I.
I’m pretending you didn’t ask
me that.”



Shoshauna Shy's poems have been made into videos, produced inside taxi cabs, and even decorated the hind quarters of city buses. Not a monogamous writer, she works on 7-11 pieces at the same time. She is also a flash fiction author— but that's another story!

fi•bi by A.R. Williams

After my daughter
scaled the tree

an eastern phoebe frightened,
thrashed her wings

like a river
struggling against its

banks, returned to her perch,
and once again

chirped her name.



A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (USA). His debut chapbook, Funeral in the Wild, is slated to be released with Kelsay Books in February 2024. He can be found on twitter and instagram @arw_poetry

A Thunderclap of the Mind by A.R. Williams

I can still see your
blue face,
swallowed by
an oxygen mask, your
mother’s consciousness
returning like
a weathered ship
finding its way back
to shore,
and my hands shuddering
like a sail at sea,
even now,
as I zip up your sleeper.



A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (USA). His debut chapbook, Funeral in the Wild, is slated to be released with Kelsay Books in February 2024. He can be found on twitter and instagram @arw_poetry

A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Doug Holder

          * inspired by Ernest Heminway's short story

All I want is a clean
well-lighted place,
perhaps the silhouette of a tree
shadowing my face.
A beer so dark
and deep
it loosens the secrets
that I keep.

The polished bar
gleaming with Mahogony
serenity.

No music
to break the spell,
a table,
an old man
before he faces
the stygian kiss of
the night
where he
dwells.



Doug Holder is the co-president of the New England Poetry Club and the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA.

When That April by David Ram

After the widow’s daylong funeral,
the grieving guests departed, grown children
returned to their lives, and timed lamps appeared,

the windows of her empty house emit
an amber glow along the gravel road,
illuminating yellow daffodils.

In several months, the realtor arrives,
admires the lady ferns flooding the curb,
the tiger lilies lining the driveway,

and the kousa dogwood draping the walk,
but inside, he pulls wilted violets
from alcove sills and trashes plastic pots.

When a fluke October blizzard buries
the garden, the new woman and her two
little children build a snowman with eyes

of stone, a carrot nose, and pine-branch arms;
below the soppy snow, daffodils dream
of flowering and form their daughter bulbs.



David Ram lives in western Massachusetts, where he practices poetry writing and dory rowing: his recent poems appear in Naugatuck River Review and Grand Little Things; his rowboat appears regularly on Nashawannuck Pond.