How It Works by Alex Stolis

After I got sober, Dad and I would have
Father/Son nights whenever I was in town.
Perkins, a meeting, make the rounds of local
taverns, schmooze with his old regulars.

Years of owning a bar made him a regular
in two smoke-filled rooms: slinging booze
to childhood friends—sharing burnt coffee
and stale Danish with strangers.

One night, a woman was getting her one year
chip. Told us how she planned to drink after her
first meeting. I remembered how much I didn’t
remember of my first year. Blur of withdrawal.

Night terrors. Compulsion to use. She gripped
her medallion, looked at Dad. In a small bird
of a voice—What you said to me a year ago
kept me coming back. He smiled, relit his cigar.

We stood for the Serenity Prayer. The woman
squeezed my hand. I washed coffee cups,
emptied ashtrays. Dad’s turn to lock up
the Alano. We were the last ones to leave.

Twelve years ago I got my one-year chip.
Dad got his on my thirteenth birthday. I asked
what he said at her first meeting—he took out
a fresh cigar, shook his head—I have no idea.



Alex Stolis latest collection Bombshells, Bozos & Bastards was released by Alien Buddha Press in 2026. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.

Untitled by Roberta Beach Jacobson

wag of a shelter dog's tail



Roberta Beach Jacobson is a 74-yar-old poet, painter, editor, and author who makes her home in the US Midwest.

As Yet No Efts, A Spring Song by Ann E. Michael

No efts as yet, though soil’s warmed enough
to coerce lively arthropods to coil beneath
downed boughs in fungus’ froth-like rot,
stump-stuck in muddy, greening muck.

And no phoebes yet, although the bees
bungle into budding fruit-tree leaves
to tussle at each newly unlatched flower.
For they can’t wait. They’ve wakened

and must have nourishment, they hum,
encumbered by their pressing need.
Lately, sun’s warmth feels hidden,
as if bidden by cloud and rain to stay

at some remove; nevertheless, mild nights
urge amphibians to move, to seek out
dark moist nooks. Efts can travel far.
And phoebes may return. They may.



Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies, six chapbooks, and two previous collections. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog

Thin as Coins by Steve Klepetar

Some phrases wear thin as coins.
"Take care." "See you soon."
We press them into each other's palms
and walk off in opposite directions,
warm metal in our fists,
not sure what they might buy.

And when you ask what I meant
by "I'm fine,"
I think of all the small bridges
we build out of nothing,
how they hold,
how we cross them every day
without once looking down.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Words by Steve Klepetar

          “Words bounce. Words, if you let them,
          will do what they want to do and what
          they have to do.”

          -Anne Carson

Dangerous, those little puffs of air
shaped by tongue and teeth and the soft
clicking of the palate,
how they leave the mouth like moths
and find the lamp of another's ear.
My mother kept her words in a drawer
beside the good spoons, brought them out
for company, polished,
a little tarnished at the edges.
The rest she swallowed, and they settled
in her like stones in a riverbed,
smoothing slowly under all that water.
I have said things that still circle the house,
slipping under doors, tapping the glass
on windless nights.
I have said stay to a closing door
and go to an open one,
and learned the grammar of regret,
which has no future tense.
Once, a child's name dropped
from my lips in a crowded station
and a stranger turned,
her face opening like a window
in a long-shuttered house.
Now the old poets are mostly breath,
a few dry syllables pressed in paper,
and still they rise from the page
to set a kettle singing
in a kitchen that has been dark for years.
Dangerous these small winds we make,
that bend the candle flames toward each other
and, once in a while, blow them out.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual. His poems have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Reaching for the sky just to surrender by Doug Holder

          After "The Stranger Song" by Leonard Cohen

A gambler has a religion,
his tired dogma
that God is behind him
with every roll
of the pockmarked dice.

He will clasp
his hands
above his head
and realize that
it is not in the
cards for him.

Some errant Jack-of Hearts
will break his own.

His racing forms a desert
of defeat.

Our man will continue to look up
at the blue sky
raise his fists
like a mad King Lear

and surrender...



Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, and former co-president of the New England Poetry Club. He teaches at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

The Comedian by Terri Kirby Erickson

No longer young, he paces back and forth
across the comedy club stage with the sort
of limping walk people associate with un-
funny things, yet he is hilarious. No matter
what story he’s telling—about his family,
his friends, his car, or his cat—the audience
laughs. It’s like he invented the word comedy
and the jesters who came after him are pale
reflections of the real thing. Neither hand-
some nor plain, his clothes nondescript, his
shoes a bit dusty, you wouldn’t know him if
you saw him on the street five minutes after
the show. But as long as he’s moving his lips
and holding that microphone in his hand like
a fool’s bauble, this aging funnyman with his
thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, makes
you forget all your troubles and worries, your
petty squabbles, and disappointments. He’s
saying it’s not so bad, folks, and you believe
him. In fact, you feel a loosening of the knots
in your chest as you laugh and laugh, so much
so that when the comedian says goodnight and
exits the stage, you feel nearly weightless, as
if you might float to the ceiling like a helium
balloon. But his step grows heavier when he
leaves the building and drives to that cheap
motel too close to the highway where he takes
his blood pressure pill with a swig of bourbon
and calls his wife of thirty-five years just to say,
I miss you like crazy, Honey. I’ll be home soon.



Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home, which will soon be released by Press 53. Her work has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and International Book Award for Poetry.