Test by Don Thompson

He looks up, nitric eyes
testing you like acid on gold.
You feel fake. Exposed.

For once the crow has no comment,
which says it all,
and shrugs himself into the air

like a pawnbroker turning his back,
offering nothing—not a cent
for your most precious heirloom.



Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. A San Joaquin Almanac won the Eric Award for 2021 in the chapbook category. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.

Pasture by Don Thompson

Under a nondescript, not-quite tree,
six or eight heifers
loaf in the scant shadows,
haunch to haunch.

Their dappled russet hides remind you
of Impressionist picnickers.

They’ve browsed the foliage
as high as they can reach
and would, if they could,
consume all of their own shade—

insatiable—

like those Parisians on Sunday afternoon
with their wine and cheese,
their indolent lust.



Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. A San Joaquin Almanac won the Eric Award for 2021 in the chapbook category. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.

The Fort by Sarah Ockrim

I follow the dirt trail where the earth’s been packed down
to a small clearing in the woods by the railroad tracks.

Fresh from reading The Boxcar Children,
I’m not a dreamer, just a girl with a plan.
We’ll build a fort, a place for shelter and secrets,
a place where we can be ourselves.

We’ll make the rules, live the way we want to,
wade in the creek every day. Freckled and fierce,
we’ll spend hours at the playground,
avoiding adults who ask us why we aren’t in school.

We’ll scour the alley, looking for old bricks,
abandoned boards and still straight nails,
collecting bits of rope and sticks,
lucking out on a sheet of corrugated steel.

We’ll gather berries and eggs,
sleep under the stars, live off the land.
We’ll build a fire pit out of stones and bricks,
stretch a tarp over us when it rains.

Nevermind that winters are harsh
or that berries are only in season for weeks.
Nevermind that there aren’t any chickens
for us to steal eggs from.

Looking back, I remember craving freedom
and fairness and a place where I could be myself.

I want to tell that girl that she’s my favorite person,
that I love her tangled hair, her skinny knees
and her wild, searching soul. I want to say,

“Dream so hard it feels like you’ll burst from it,
burn brighter that you think is possible,
and read always, read every day of your life.”



Sarah Ockrim is a poet and painter. She lives in southwestern Virginia with her husband and two sons.

Why by Terence McCaffrey

I don’t know why
I’m into gardening,
but I do feel the forest
watching me. I imagine
its myriad living things
around me, cheering,
clapping their paws
or wings with each churn
of the earth. I itch
to keep checking
a single seed’s march
as if my own, to keep
willing it to sprout
out of the dark
like the birth of a star.



Terence McCaffrey’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Freshwater, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. He received a M.A.L.S. degree in Humanities from Wesleyan University and a B.A. from the University of Hartford where he was the recipient of the Phyllis B. Abrahms Award in Fiction. He lives with his wife and two children in West Simsbury, CT.

Wild by Terence McCaffrey

We emerge
from the pause
of days
in muted wonder,
start passing
an hour
in purposeless
wandering
around the local
farm. You sprint
along the line
of early
chokecherry trees,
the new sun
strong, the old
trail fresh. Laugh
like birds
that want to
be noticed.
And it’s easy
to notice you
because we’re
finally out
of the house.
Forgive me.
You have my gaze
now. Go, burst
forth across
this afternoon.
Eat what you can
of the wide,
true sky.
And if I speak,
don’t listen.



Terence McCaffrey’s poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Freshwater, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. He received a M.A.L.S. degree in Humanities from Wesleyan University and a B.A. from the University of Hartford where he was the recipient of the Phyllis B. Abrahms Award in Fiction. He lives with his wife and two children in West Simsbury, CT.

Almost, Time by M.J. Iuppa

Consider space between trees:
corridors of wind, making un-
expected turns in green leaf light

Flickering sounds, like a travel clock’s
faint tick—those sweeping seconds
caught in Spring’s tide

Drunk on the sight of dandelions, I
can’t feel the lingering cold beneath
my fingertips, which makes me

wonder if heaven is boring— will I
stand beside this cemetery’s fallen
angel & know what I’ve lost?



M.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 33 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

Pink Moon, Sprouting Grass Moon by M.J. Iuppa

She couldn’t sleep, knowing the seeds she planted
        yesterday in the greenhouse were starting to
tick-tick in thick black loam— starting to sprout

curly tails that turned their shells inside out— &
        those calculating cells divided, unfurling
the blueprint of our garden-soon-to-be

planted without leaving any open spaces— only
        pulsating shadows of so many honeybees finding
their afternoon’s work fascinating— and she couldn’t

sleep, knowing another season was revving up—
        green and luminous and warm in the scent of
apple blossoms and darkness, and something

out there, tipping over the water can, or stirring
        among the bins in the barn, or the mirror of green
eyes— those green eyes, she just couldn’t sleep.



M.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 33 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

Benched by Ben Rasnic

Change can happen
quicker than Colorado climate,
how a simple procedure
can render you powerless,
disabled, a mere invalid.

The storm has passed
and now you are faced
with the devastation
left behind in its wake—

extended hospital stays,
struggling for breath, self
worth, a meaningful
existence,

watching the world
spin out of control
on the nightly news,
saturated with details
of yet another

mass shooting
as you sit
on the sidelines
awaiting a new heart.



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.

Morning Migration by Andrew McSorley

A flock of birds relents
on the golden-drunk coast,
skipping their black-flecked
bodies over invisible currents.

Dazed and listless in a summer chair
I watch the wing-beat wheel
them higher across the berm
of horizon and into the battered
tongue of sunrise; this throng
of blur-lit birds, this feathered yawn
on the shadow-fleeced morning,
and me,
my stubborn heavy feet,
what little they carry.



Andrew McSorley is the author of What Spirits Return (Kelsay Books, 2019). A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, his poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Minnesota Review, UCity Review, HAD, Birmingham Arts Journal, and many others. He lives and works in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Night Came On by Steve Klepetar

My mother talked for hours on the phone.
We could hear her muttering in the bedroom.
Upset about something, she scraped her voice
across the blackboard bolted to the wall
of my brain. My father smoked cigars,
sipped a little scotch on ice, read history
and old novels from the public library.
“I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf,” he’d say,
looking up from the pages of Orlando
or The Waves. He wasn’t afraid of my mother,
though, had learned by then to ignore her
sighs and symptoms. Night came on.
Wolves roamed beneath the streetlights.
Often I heard hooting, or giant frogs, a deep
throaty note, like the bass string on a guitar.
Where we lived, the wildlife was something
else, prehistoric and terrible, in the old sense,
striking in the darkness like a terrible swift sword.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has appeared widely, and has received several nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Elegance by Frederick Pollack

A house inside a room inside
what the Gnostic Marcion called “this pitiful cell.”
The furnishings and people of the house
have the perfection of miniature,
which always – that’s the art of it –
leaves something out. (This doesn’t apply
to the chandelier in the ballroom,
its smallest crystal atoms wide.)
There should be jewels
on the gown of the woman at her vanity.
Her expression should be bland
or pleased, not reflective –
perhaps there was a slip of the one-hair brush.
The man in the salon at one with his tux
has too few features to feel much.
The children tumbling (advertently?) down
the curved stairs look too eager,
considering there’s no tree or anything
resembling a present. Are they all
going out? Why then the table grandly set?
If not, where are the others? Mislaid,
stolen … It seems a shame
to subject such craftsmanship to error and loss.



Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many of his other poems have appeared in print and online journals.

Haiku by Stephen Toft

deepening snow

a missed call from
a withheld number



Stephen Toft is a poet and homelessness worker who lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. His first collection the kissing bridge was published by Red Moon Press in 2008 and in December 2016 Scars Publications released his chapbook naming a storm: haiku and tanka. In 2018 Yavanika Press released his third collection deer heart as a free to download e-book.

Haiku by Stephen Toft

skein of geese

a love letter stamped
by the prison censor



Stephen Toft is a poet and homelessness worker who lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. His first collection the kissing bridge was published by Red Moon Press in 2008 and in December 2016 Scars Publications released his chapbook naming a storm: haiku and tanka. In 2018 Yavanika Press released his third collection deer heart as a free to download e-book.

Haiku by Stephen Toft

a cop fills up

her patrol car...
winter stars



Stephen Toft is a poet and homelessness worker who lives in Lancaster, UK with his wife and their children. His first collection the kissing bridge was published by Red Moon Press in 2008 and in December 2016 Scars Publications released his chapbook naming a storm: haiku and tanka. In 2018 Yavanika Press released his third collection deer heart as a free to download e-book.

Goodbye to All That by Mary Rohrer-Dann

The house emptied, she lies on the floor
of her parents’ bedroom, the ancient fan
pushing air thick with heat and shadows.

They argued throughout her childhood,
voices muddy behind the door, except
for the abrupt Ukrainian curse–Suka! Mudak!

Did they make her under this creaking fan?
And was she made in joy, or mere animal need,
as she and her husband had made their youngest,

lying afterwards in silence, bodies subsiding,
hearts raw, both counting the minutes until
he moved to the guest room down the hall.

Her parents seemed to find their way back.
Did they have more faith in love,
in each other? Or was it simply

the Old World dictum against divorce?
And at what cost? Tomorrow
she will sit with her widowed father

at closing and pass the house to its new
owners, a Latino couple, first on the block,
the tiny woman’s belly big with twins.



Mary Rohrer-Dann writes and paints in central PA; her work appears in Clackamas Review, Third Wednesday, Rat’s Ass Review, Vestal Review, The Drabble, Flash Fiction, and other venues.

Assassin by Howie Good

When I saw the brown snake
lift its wedge-shaped head
from the grass, I picked up
a stone and threw it without
really aiming. I don’t even
know what kind of snake it was,
harmless or poisonous, but
it died instantly all the same.
I had just turned 12, and a bunch
of us guys had gone camping
overnight alongside the Delaware.
The snake was already losing shape
as we got back in our canoes
that morning and pushed off
into the river and, with the sun
in our eyes, blindly paddled away.



Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).

From Richmond, 1865 by Patrick Tong

          after Lily Zhou

These mornings, I could mistake your sutured

shadows of sunrise for the fists of another fire.

The bridges, once hovering over the minnowed river,

now sunken into a tapestry of flames. Water. Fire. 

Earth, the imprints of bootstep staggered like 

a graveyard. Air, the horizon coloring itself into

the wilt of my father’s ashes. Richmond, in years, 

they’ll immobilize us into history textbooks, 

black-and-white snapshots of an anonymous family, 

a polychromatic film we’ll never watch. Confederacy, 

treachery. Richmond, in this divided country, we’ll 

multiply the death toll by three each day, subtract 

neighborhoods from the population, add epitaphs to 

an inventory for the ages. We’ll wake into the 

world where every poem bloodies into another 

battlefield. Listen as they split into stanzas of smoke 

and setback, the grammar of war always built 

on clauses of purpose. As we raise rifles to the 

sky like a hunch. As a generation of bullets 

immigrates through the land. As somewhere, 

another neighborhood sputters to the ground, 

stone house walls creasing into each other like gravity.  

Patrick Tong is a student from the greater Chicago area.

Ritual by Paul Waring

Breakfast coffee notes
breathe life into a room

morning sun awakes
a mahogany table

where five HB pencils lie
like fresh-baked baguettes

and plates of paper wait
with hungry mouths.

Through open windows
of thought, first words.



Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist from Wirral, UK. His poetry is published in Prole, Atrium, Obsessed With Pipework, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip and elsewhere. Awarded second place in the 2019 Yaffle Prize, commended in the 2019 Welshpool Poetry Competition, his pamphlet ‘Quotidian’ is published by Yaffle.

Sequoias by Paul Waring

Passive as priests at confession
sequoias wait open-armed
to receive storms.

Watch widow-black clouds
gather to grieve drum-heavy
on parched leaves,

feed neural pathways,
deep along unquenchable
quarry of roots.

After rain, itchy bark beetle
and fleet-footed squirrels
in stop-start relays.

Warbler, tanager and nuthatch notes;
distant rata-tat-tat echoes
of woodpeckers back at work.



Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist from Wirral, UK. His poetry is published in Prole, Atrium, Obsessed With Pipework, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip and elsewhere. Awarded second place in the 2019 Yaffle Prize, commended in the 2019 Welshpool Poetry Competition, his pamphlet ‘Quotidian’ is published by Yaffle.

The day after Christmas by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

I wake to the unravelling of carols
and air conditioning. The tv is
on mute, and a foamy formation
like The Great Wave Off Kanagawa plays
ad nauseam. In time I know that this
was real horror and they were doomed -
those tourists swirling like ants in a whirlpool
while the seismic wave swelled with teeth,
and the Indian Ocean advanced in a wall
of menacing white.

In my world, an eerie quiet has settled
with the sterile odour of death. It's the day
after Christmas, and I am catatonic
in my hospital gown as the nurse asks
if I want a drink of water or the channel changed
to something cheerful but all I want is
for her to mute her robotic voice
and not invade my shell. All I can recall
is Christmas Eve burnt into my brain in the shape
of a shoe filling up with the squelch of pale
pink clots. In a surreal garden ER nurses flit
like moths while a stone eyed doctor stares
at an unfavourable screen. His head moves
ogre-like and I lip read that his transducer picks
no yolk sac or heartbeat.

Half a world away, the tsunami flays
all in its path and the sky is a collage
of seaplanes buzzing over swamps
of brown. In the watery fields of clay, bodies
and broken wood bob. When I wake, it is
in barbed wire gripping my pelvis -
a dull burning, the twitch of a cored pear.
The nurse is back and she rubs
my hand in a bid to comfort saying that I’m young
and healthy and can try again, but all I want
is silence. She pats a vein and the needle tingles,
the cocktail blurring the tv and its tragedies blank
my mind coaxed into sudden free fall
plunging like a stone
in the rushing wave of Trazadone.



Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist, poet, and pianist. Her recent works have been featured in Silver Birch Press, Visitant Lit, and Underwood Press. New works are forthcoming in Black Bough Poetry, Multiplicity Magazine, and elsewhere. She is Chief Editor for Authora Australis. Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings