Valentine's Day Redux by Martha Christina

Alone at the kitchen table,
she loses hand after hand
of Solitaire, and scowls
at the Knave of Hearts.



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’s Pollinator Project. Born and raised in Indiana, she now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

His Room by Matt Pitt

A single bed.

Four pairs of shoes, polished, ranked.
Eight shoe-trees.

On the bedside table
a copy of Anna Karenina and

a balding teddy bear, one eye gone.

Dust-motes.

In the slightly open window,
tomorrow’s ironed shirt

hanging.



Matt Pitt is a poet and screenwriter from Brighton, UK. He has previously published in Acumen, Ambit, Prole and Under the Radar. His debut feature film, Greyhawk, received a Special Commendation Prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His second feature, Man of Sorrows, begins shooting in 2021.

Observation 2021 by Ben Rasnic

Nothing so sexy
as the parenthetical
crinkle of your eyes
whenever you smile
behind the mask
you wear.



Ben Rasnic currently resides in Bowie, Maryland. Author of four published collections (three available from amazon.com), Ben's poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Step by Step by Kara Knickerbocker

my older brother teaches me about fear
with my belly close to the cool stone
in the midst of an August day, clinging
to the rocky cliff buried in the woods
on the side of the deep canyon
back behind our neighbor’s house
where we’d gone to explore, for the first time,
together. It had been his idea to scale
the steep surface and, not wanting to appear
like a girl, or a baby, but for once, his equal,
I climbed after him, trying to retrace his steps
but the navy blue splash of his gym shorts
was already waves ahead of where I was,
bringing swift sickness when I looked up.
I became paralyzed with fear, my left hand
dumb in one crevice, my right sweating
into the sharpness of another. There was nowhere
to step, even if I could uproot my feet. Already
at the top, he shouted down to me directions
for a space to grip, pointed corners jutting out,
something to hold to, but I could not move.
It was then he lowered himself down the face of the wall
until he reached me, left foot here, he instructed,
it’s okay, he said, and I shifted into trust, as step
by step, like a method for living, we pulled ourselves
from the gorge below, back on common ground.



The author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Kara Knickerbocker's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, The Dallas Review, among others. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: www.karaknickerbocker.com.

Traveling Home by David Milley

Driving back from Batsto, we took the long way home,
the road running through places where your youth began.
"So many houses that were here," you say, "are gone."
I reply, "So many new ones now that weren't here then."

So, another road story begins. You first took me down
this road the year we met, and I joined you on that day
when you, so proud, took me to your parents' home.
Another time, we stopped in every bar along the way.

That field you tilled, now grown in oak. The store
where friends met, shuttered. I know every memory,
can recite each, line by line, the map of our adventure.
I reach across the car and rest my hand upon your knee.

After forty years together, traveling home with you,
every road's familiar, and every road is new.



Writing since the 1970s, David Milley's work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Christopher Street, and Bay Windows. David lives in New Jersey with his husband of four decades, Warren, who's worked as farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. Nowadays, Warren gardens and keeps honeybees; David walks and writes.

Hen and Mutt by David Milley

In matching chairs, two old women watched tv each night.
Henrietta browsed a book; Mutt did her crochet.
Volume turned low, each worked in her own light,
pausing, now and then, to chat the doings of their day.

Our favorite aunt, Henrietta stood taller than our Mom.
Above a sea of holiday socks, Hen soared in, bearing planes,
a chemistry set, that special doll. In all her visits to our home,
Hen made her sister laugh, told stories of old times.

Mutt never came to see us; Mom, smiling, shook her head.

At the end of every night, two old women climbed the stairs.
Mutt went first, to light the way and warm their single bed.
Hen would close her book at last and rise to join Mutt there.

Each night, this way, for more than sixty years, until the day
Mutt came downstairs alone, kissed Hen, and put her book away.



Writing since the 1970s, David Milley's work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Christopher Street, and Bay Windows. David lives in New Jersey with his husband of four decades, Warren, who's worked as farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. Nowadays, Warren gardens and keeps honeybees; David walks and writes.

A Long Night's Work Ahead by Rose Menyon Heflin

The ancient
lighthouse keeper
slowly
ascended
the stairs -
one at a time,
one at a time -
drenched in sweat,
grasping the railing
and silently
counting
to two hundred
and fifteen,
when he finally reached
the top,
only to find that
the summer night
had turned
stormy
and the waters
choppy,
with visibility
waning,
a dense,
impenetrable fog
bearing down
on his troubled,
aging mind.



Rose Menyon Heflin is a poet and artist from Wisconsin who loves nature. Among other venues, her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Bramble, The Closed Eye Open, Eastern Structures, The Light Ekphrastic, Littoral Magazine, Plum Tree Tavern, Red Alder Review, Sparked Literary Magazine, and Visual Verse.

Still Life on the Saint Simons Causeway, Eastbound Traffic Stopped by an Accident by Steven Croft

Window down, stalled between mainland and island

on a winter evening, line of cars tethered by the sounds
of our rumbling motors.

A brown marsh rabbit noses in the roadside grass
cut away monthly by orange riding mowers
from the tufted expanse of Spartina.

White egret perched in a nearby hammock of cedars,
quiet inquisitor of water, mud minnows and tadpoles,
narrow throat speechless, shoulders tensed with stillness.

Up ahead, hidden by the rising arch of a channel bridge,
EMTs pull the injured from a three-car pileup, life
still or trembling in their hands.

Two cars back, rap music pounds the frame of a powder
blue Chevy, as, in my rearview, the sun gives a blood kiss
goodbye to sky and tidal marsh.



Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, Red Eft Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Roadie by Sharon Waller Knutson

She looks like a Barbie Doll
with her painted face and nails,
synthetic breasts rising

under her pink T-shirt,
long lean legs in Levis,
small feet in slingback stiletto sandals.

From a red Cardinals Baseball cap,
her hair, once golden, now silver,
falls like a blanket over her shoulders.

Navajo bracelets jangle
on both wrists as she carries
the electric guitar and microphone

for the Kenny Rogers lookalike
she has followed cross country
for a quarter of a century.

Her face is a roadmap of where
they’ve been since she left
her children behind with their father

in the trailer park eating pizza
and drinking coca cola
and watching a Braves game,

but the past is about to catch up
as their adult faces shine
in the audience like a neon sign.



Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist whose poems have appeared recently in Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Five-Two and The Song Is… Her first full-length book collection, What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Tell You, will be published by Kelsay Books in October.

Feathered calligraphy by Richard Weaver

I raise my arms and motion
towards the water of the gulf
when a V of pelicans approach
from the west. Invariably
they veer towards me
and rise higher with the heat
reflecting off my tin roof.
Their liquid shadows
wash over me in wonder.



Richard Weaver volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs: FRIGG, Mad Swirl, Spank the Carp, Adelaide, Free State Review, and Magnolia Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005), performed 4 times to date. More recently, his 100th prose poem was published. More than 100 of his prose poems have been published since 2016.

The Time of Day by Ed Ahern

A widow walks by my house each day
in syncopation with the mailman.
She had also lost a daughter,
but what is gone is carried deep,
for she always smiles and stops to chat.
We exchange perhaps two hundred words
about weather and children and neighbors,
but never about the death and absence
so twined into our daily living,
and the knitting we do to cope.
We sense with tacit understanding
that our inanities give unsaid comfort
to our silenced fears and grief.



Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.

Invasive Species by Patricia Davis-Muffett

This fall, the deer herd
chews languid on the ruined branches
of the trees of spring.
City friends visit
adore the baby deer
as we mutter to ourselves
enemy, vandal, rat.
The bellow of our pup
keeps them at yard’s edge for now
a smidge less bold than before she came.

I would not miss them if they left,
though I can hardly deny them
what keeps their children growing.
The fox, though, I would miss--
last year, two, playing so near the windows,
chasing, wrestling, gekkering their joy--
our older dog, rarely bothered,
becoming the hunter he thinks he might have been
as they taunted, so close, peered in,
retreated to their burrow,
the one they took over from the groundhogs,
renovated, upscaled, a place to raise their pups.
I wonder if he succeeded--
his hunt so different from the puppy’s howl,
he, catching sight of movement in the brush,
exits silent, his fur like moonless night,
he bolts and glides, gone before we even see
the target he has locked.

Just as I am sure
the fox has gone, hoping it has moved,
I see one, bushy tail magnificent,
red coat like the paintbox
the maple trees are reaching for.
She locks her eyes on me,
as I turn into the drive,
then darts off into woods.
Did my hunter kill her mate?
Am I the enemy she sees?

Five a.m., I step out
into chilly yard, pitch dark,
my predators in tow.
Through the darkness,
I can hear her screech,
and my invasive self
inclines to howl back,
but stifles back the sound--
a trick I’ve learned
in an effort to survive.



Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was recently a finalist for the Julia Darling Poetry Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including Limestone, Coal City Review, Neologism, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Pretty Owl Poetry, di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival), The Blue Nib and Amethyst Review. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband and three children and makes her living in technology marketing.

A Blessing by Joseph Mills

At our wedding reception, my wife’s father,
who was past sixty, twice as heavy as when
he played rugby, a former pack-a-day smoker
and still a drinker, dropped to the ground,
then he popped back up and spun around
before anyone could react. It took a moment
to realize he had done the splits, deliberately,
fantastically, as if this night of celebration
with family from four different nations
had moved him to a kind of ecstasy. We joked
about what alcohol’s effects could be, but,
over time, even as we forgot so much of who
gave us what, we came to recognize the gift
it had been, an offering of joy and benediction.



A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published six collections of poetry with Press 53. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family.

Young Girl Up an Old Tree by Russell Rowland

The stricken pine was caught and held
on its way down, by a good neighbor.

At that angle it was more a staircase
for the child to climb, than a ladder.

She would go home needles and sap,
with Gram’s photo from ground level.

In my childhood girls didn’t climb trees.
Branches were full of boys, brave ones.

The timid got jeered off, told to go play
with dolls. So yes, we’ve made progress.

From such an elevation, Gram appeared
foreshortened, belittled, and earthbound.

The girl could see way out to her father,
dot of color on Squam Lake’s early ice—

trying its solidity a half-mile offshore,
the way he did once, a boy, on a dare.



Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

Sunday Brunch (2008) by Carolynn Kingyens

Justin called himself
a feminist,
and promised me
he’d do the laundry
and I’d drink the beer;
said he made a mean lasagna -
a recipe he'd learned
from his dying mother.

She had a partner
named Sonya,
and they were still
blissfully in love
after 25 years of raising
a fatherless boy
into a young man;
instilling in him compassion
for both sexes,
not just his own.

I was curious
when the invitation came
written on a napkin
from feminist-Justin,
asking me to join
the three of them
for Sunday brunch
in a sunroom
built off the kitchen,
an addition
a year before
his mother’s diagnosis.

They welcomed me
into their intimate tribe,
of books, lilacs,
earthy accents,
of A Prairie Home Companion
trailing off
in the background
amongst warm conversation
and acceptance.

I’d watch their gentle exchanges,
glances
between a mother
and her woman,
glances
between these women
to Justin and to me.

And the whole, sun-filled room
was palpable
in these moments
of laughter
and cancer,
of Far East travels
and trinkets –
in stories about coming home
and being home.



Carolynn Kingyens’ debut book of poetry, Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound (Kelsay Books), can be ordered through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Greenlight, Book Culture, and Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop. In addition to poetry, Carolynn writes narrative essays, book reviews, micro/flash fiction, and short stories. Her latest flash fiction, "Sunglasses at Night," can be read here: https://acrossthemargin.com/sunglasses-at-night/. She resides in New York with her husband and two amazing daughters.

From the Hill by Richard Martin

Half way between where I sat near the hilltop
and a lonely copper beech in a square green field
stood a group of dark trees huddled together.
For no particular reason, I began to count them –

there were seven, that magic, meaningful number;
had someone deliberately planted seven trees?
Or had they accidentally echoed human concerns
about fortune and meaning? I asked myself

why we are so fascinated by seven rather than six –
I guess it all began when someone added the four
corners of the earth to the notion of the Trinity,
or simply thought of the days of the week.

Whatever, there are seven trees bent slightly
towards each other by pure chance in a dull clump
at the edge of a rough unploughed field half way
between me and that lonely beech in its green square.



Richard Martin is an English writer who lives in the Netherlands close to the point where Belgium, Germany and Holland meet. After retiring as a university teacher in Germany, he turned his attention to writing, and has published three collections of poetry and numerous poems in magazines in England, the US, and Austria.

A Moment Before Leaving by John L. Stanizzi

          Forever -- composed of nows –
                                        --624
                                        --Emily Dickinson

There must be more time
for you to allow me to reflect
on all that I beheld in dreams

and in waking.

It may take more time than you have
or are willing to bestow.
But please.

I’m going to leave with nothing anyway,
so why not concede this one

foolish, irresponsible, earnest wish?



John L. Stanizzi’s books include; Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, and POND. Besides Red Eft Review, John's poems have been in Prairie Schooner, Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, others. His nonfiction has appeared in Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, Literature and Belief, others. 

Of the Ones Not Afraid by Sarah Elkins

There’s nothing to do now
but get right with the land.

I’ve started with the hemlocks,
sawing off the low branches
choking in the understory,
bound in poison ivy.

My neighbor comes over
to talk. He won’t listen
when I say keep some space.
I’ve been sick,
a fever and cough.

He steps nearer, tells me how the forest
used to be lawn.
His paper arms sweep the air
moving between us.

Grass needing mowing all the way back.
See the daffodils, he points. 

They used to be everywhere.



Sarah Elkins lives and writes in Lewisburg, WV. Her poetry has appeared in Sanskrit Literary Arts Magazine, Northridge Review, Summer Stock Journal, and Rust + Moth; her critical analysis in Kestrel. Sarah is a student in the MFA program at Pacific University.

Antique Cabin by Sarah Elkins

You bring home the unsalvageable,
one oaken length at a time—
pegged mortise, treenail and tenon,
to fuel our fire. We have by now
burnt an entire home,
sweeping the hand-smithed nails
from the hearth with the ashes
to strew beneath the hemlock.

When we are gone,
they will surmise a great fire
destroyed a cabin here.



Sarah Elkins lives and writes in Lewisburg, WV. Her poetry has appeared in Sanskrit Literary Arts Magazine, Northridge Review, Summer Stock Journal, and Rust + Moth; her critical analysis in Kestrel. Sarah is a student in the MFA program at Pacific University.

Bow Season by Sarah Elkins

The deer carcass
in the rough beside the trail
reduced to a row
of slender white ribs
reaching out from the ruin
of wet leaves
like too many fingers.

The flowers of her body—
bloom of intestine,
broad red-leaf of liver,
great elephant-ear lungs,
and rosebud heart—
didn’t last one good night.



Sarah Elkins lives and writes in Lewisburg, WV. Her poetry has appeared in Sanskrit Literary Arts Magazine, Northridge Review, Summer Stock Journal, and Rust + Moth; her critical analysis in Kestrel. Sarah is a student in the MFA program at Pacific University.