Pretty Hard to Know by Jeffrey Zable

Watching an old movie from the 40’s in which every one
of the actors--except for maybe the kid--has passed on,
a question comes to mind: What would any of the actors think
if they knew I was watching them right now? which, in a sense,
is keeping them alive.

After I asked myself this, I wondered how I might feel when I’m gone
if somehow I could observe someone reading one of my poems,
smiling afterward, or even raising their head in serious reflection.

I guess, in the end, it’s pretty hard to know. . .



Jeffrey Zable is a teacher, conga drummer/percussionist who plays for dance classes and rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area, and a writer of poetry, flash-fiction, and non-fiction. His writing has appeared recently in Chewers & Masticadores, Linked Verse, Ranger, Cacti Fur, Uppagus, Greensilk, Aether Avenue, and many others...

Gifts from a Neighbor by David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton

Dwayne moved home to help his aging parents.
We’d have Cokes on their porch. After
a beach week they brought us salt-water taffy.

Dwayne’s stomach hurt, his appetite was gone.
His clothes looked like they hung on a hook, not a man. The doctor ordered studies, a biopsy:

Pancreatic cancer.

We told them about hospice. Fentanyl
was like god for him, eased the pain.
What was his mother’s name? Ernestine.

His father was also Dwayne. Senior. The lights—
without sirens—finally came, not to save him
but to pronounce his death.

Maybe they were the same thing.



David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton’s poems have appeared in Willows Wept Review, Unlost, One Sentence Poems, and previously in Red Eft Review. He holds an MFA from Regis University. He lives near (sometimes in) the Colorado Rocky Mountains with his wife and several miniature poodles.

Marking Time by Howie Good

Almost the first thing I do in the morning
is take a bunch of pills, usually with my coffee,
but sometimes with the sordid remains
of a glass of wine from the night before.
Back in the fall, I had cancer surgery,
followed by thirty sessions of radiation.
My skin cracked and peeled like old paint
and my bones turned strangely rubbery.
Now every three months I must drive
into Boston from the South Shore
for a precautionary CAT scan of my chest
and abdomen. Parking is impossible.
The hospital buildings are topped
by coils of razor wire. And I’m still dying.



Howie Good co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Emergence by Sarah Russell

Today I saw a single silky thread from aspen
to eaves. I traced it and watched a spider,
backlit by the sun, weaving precise gossamer
tendrils, interconnected. There’s a new hatch
of dragonflies at our pond, the final leg
of a year’s journey from egg to nymph to adult.
It’s called Emergence—their last, fruitful days.
It’s what I feel after 80 years—an emergence
of days, of seasons, each one savored,
and family—eggs, nymphs, adults—the intricacy
of webs and silken threads.



Sarah Russell’s poetry has been published in Rattle, Misfit Magazine, Red Eft Review, and Third Wednesday. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She has two poetry collections, I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons (Kelsay Books). She blogs at https://SarahRussellPoetry.net

Autumn by Sarah Russell

Sugar maples are the first to turn,
mottled orange and scarlet with the green,
trying on the season. I need a sweater
now for morning walks.

The geese abandon summer ponds
in keening, migrant skeins to follow
shorelines south.

In twilight, remnant fireflies
glint urgent calls to mate, hopeful,
as we are, for one last tryst
before winter.



Sarah Russell’s poetry has been published in Rattle, Misfit Magazine, Red Eft Review, and Third Wednesday. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She has two poetry collections, I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons (Kelsay Books). She blogs at https://SarahRussellPoetry.net

Ode to My Purse by Sarah Russell

The one that’s 10 years old —
its leather soiled and supple,
lining grayed by a thousand
ins and outs of billfolds, keys,
candy. The purse fits me,

softening with use, sagging
into the middle of itself, scarred
by day to day, but refusing
to concede to age, zippers
still meshing, handle still
carrying its weight, stitching
still strong.



Sarah Russell’s poetry has been published in Rattle, Misfit Magazine, Red Eft Review, and Third Wednesday. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She has two poetry collections, I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons (Kelsay Books). She blogs at https://SarahRussellPoetry.net

Textures by Ahrend Torrey

Do we only live when the big promotion is given?

Do we only live when the awful day comes, and the ambulance arrives,
and everyone’s gathered around our loved one?

Do we only live on exciting vacations to foreign countries?

     Or

do we also live when we don’t realize we’re living at all—between
big memories?

—Like now, Deek and Dova are tearing up the grass,
are chasing each other’s tail,

and Purl (my cat) is peering up the storm door
at a tree frog
stuck to the glass.

My husband just stepped from his office: we ate hummus together,
during his fifteen-minute /break/ from class.

Do these textures also make up living? Of course,
let us feel them—

I’m learning they’re quickest to wear away.
They never last.



Ahrend Torrey is the author of Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022) and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat.

The End is Music by A.R. Williams

Cascading water pours over
rocks vested in
moss, whispering to me
like a mother soothing her child.

At a distance,
a visitor crunches through the underbrush
as the rain’s rhythmic
clattering swells. Suddenly, a
croaking frog calls to me like the town crier,
heralding the arrival of night break.

Reclining in wooded solitude,
I end the day
with nature's symphony.



A.R. Williams is the author of A Funeral in the Wild (Kelsay Books, 2024) and editor of East Ridge Review.

Gratitude List #48 by Ace Boggess

Forgive me when I praise my wealth
of aspects not yet praised:

aches in back, ankles, knees
of which I complain
to have something to say
when conversations come to me;

the tornado that leapt me,
a last-minute pardon,
its straight-line downdrafts
painting a swirling mural
of muted colors;

all advances I missed
while locked in a cell
so I stepped from that time machine
into a shocking future of fascination;

the comets hidden by city clouds;

the women & men I didn’t love
while too afraid of their touch I craved.

Praise my pain & fear.
Praise absences, no-
second-chances.
Praise cuisines I’ve never tasted.
Praise suffering & praise contempt.

Not once have I praised my awfulness.
I praise it now & know this brings me peace.



Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

With Six Grandsons Behind the Wheel by Sharon Waller Knutson

The call we fear
we're going to get comes
while we’re eating
popcorn and watching
television in the evening.

It’s our oldest son
who just turned fifty.
I hear sadness
in his voice
and clutch my cell
phone like a raft.

I gasp for air
as he speaks
of a car collision,
our second oldest
grandson in a coma
in an ICU, a machine
breathing for him.

I see the baby
with chubby cheeks
and curls turn into
a tall twenty-five-
year-old reciting
his vows in a suit
just three months ago.

My heart is broken,
I say as my son
and his father go silent.
I wish I could
change places with him.
But all I can do is wait.

On his fifth day in the ICU,
we get another call.
This time his mother
shouts, He’s breathing
on his own and opened
one eye and said,
What’s up Mama?



Sharon Waller Knutson has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has published 12 books of poetry, including the most recent, The Leading Ladies of My Life (Cyberwit 2023) and its sequel, My Grandfather is a Cowboy (Cyberwit 2024). She has published 1,000 poems in more than 60 publications. She is the editor of Storyteller Poetry Review and lives in Arizona.