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.