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.