Answer to a Recent Question Regarding Supporting Me and/or Red Eft Review

An incredibly thoughtful and kind poet recently asked how she could support me and/or Red Eft Review. It made me feel seen and appreciated. And I am happy to report that others have asked this same question in the past. So I figured I would write a brief post...

I will never charge poets to submit. I have considered adding a "Donate" or "Tip Jar" option, but I don't see myself doing that as long as I have a job and I am financially stable. 

An easy way to support me and other editors is to buy our books. We are also poets struggling to share our work with the world. If you do buy a book and like what you read, let others know about it and/or consider buying another one by the same editor. 

Below are links to my poetry collections that are currently available online should you be inclined to check them out. 

Thanks, as always, for considering. 

Corey

heads held low 

Passing Cars and a Review of Passing Cars

Junk Drawer

The Weight of Shadows

White Flag Raised

Winter Morning Observations by Russell Rowland

A gentle powdering of snow
overnight, like talc on a baby’s bottom.

Enough to show there are no footprints
outside my door,
or under my bedroom window.

I find that reassuring, as most would.

Still, crows are about, in lower air. Snow
is a background against which
they can remind us that black is beautiful.

“In your own way,”
I concede, from behind my windowpane.

An ambulance happens by
without red lights on: either the urgency
is no emergency, or else EMTs

are heading to McDonald’s for breakfast.

When I open the window, snow lies on
the sill. I write my name.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire, where he helps judge Poetry Out Loud competitions. His latest poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Mabel and the Band by John Grey

On a makeshift stage at the back of the bar,
Mabel Starr and her band belted out
the blues of their sharecropper forbears,
infused with a misery all their own.

Pain so energized, the Cajuns
guzzled beer to it and the Creoles
paid in kind with the sweat of sinewy
dance steps in that squeeze of body and brow.

It never felt better than to be reminded
of the bad times, some down so low
they even clapped hands to the accordion,
or ground their bones against the bass.

The guitarist’s busy fingers
belied his lazy look, as he pitched into a solo
that cased the entire fretboard
and laid the strings to waste.

The drummer, in his cocked red hat,
pounded pigskin like a miner
trapped behind a rubble wall,
so hard, so fiercely, he freed himself.

And then there was Mabel, a full-bodied
woman in a sparkling hourglass gown,
hugging the mike to her breast like a lover,
rasping sweet with a voice from before she was born.

A gut’s worth of delivery, nothing withheld,
chest like bellows, swaying back and forth,
in the ring with everything ever done to her
and punching from the throat.



John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, City Brink, and Tenth Muse. His latest books, Subject Matters, Between Two Fires, and Covert are available through Amazon. John also has work upcoming in Hawaii Pacific Review, Amazing Stories, and Cantos.

Trophy Shot by Howie Good

You kneel in your camos beside a three-point buck,
and grabbing the elegant head by the antlers,
twist it with both hands into an unnatural position
just for the picture, man the hunter, the born killer,
in a classic pose, while all around you, the forest trees,
already nearly bare, reach up as though pleading,
starved for the cold, clean touch of snow.

Howie Good is author of the poetry book, The Dark, available from Sacred Parasite, which will also publish his book, Akimbo, in 2025.

The Woman Named After the First Woman Asks for a Poem on Gratitude During a Farmers Market in July by Michael Brockley

Eva buys a purple hydrangea from the vendor in the turquoise truck beside the poems-on-demand tent. She tells the poet behind the orange typewriter she is grateful for the mornings, after dawn showers have washed away the humidity. She samples couscous with chickpeas at a Moroccan breakfast booth. And welcomes the voices of shoppers that wash over her like the fragrance of garden phlox. With the hortensia blossom fixed behind her right ear, Eva strolls through the market in the company of a light breeze. Appreciating the new friends she makes and learning the names of leashed dogs and cats in papooses. Thor and Aragorn. Luna and Betsy Ross. The poet who types the ode to gratitude compliments Eva on her black dress that is decorated with red flowers. Florets so small they might be any hybrid from the gardens of history or fiction. Eva is grateful on this Saturday morning for her beautiful daughter, whose name, Gina, means “queen.” And thankful for her daughter’s father, as well, who is still alive. On this first weekend in July, Eva is grateful for her own name. Eva, which is a sonnet when spoken by the poet fourteen times.



Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, confetti, and 912 Review. His prose poems are also forthcoming in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and Down in the Dirt.