Slipping softly through sun-dappled trees swaying grasses in time to summer’s hum casting pollen up like sequinned sparkles strolling though blossoming fields ruffling the feather of the nesting birds. Whipping waves into mountains of spray stripping the last leaves from autumn’s dying. Hats are tossed into the air the rain flies in the face of night. Forever moving, a restless rover knowing no settled home. Tonight there may be howling and the windows may shake but by morning there will be little sign except the detritus of the wild. Packed up gypsy-like, the wind trails his life through the world and is shut out even in the quiet times.
Strike
I saw a spark of lightning in the dark, its burst of brilliance lit up the whole sky. The mark of blackness after was so stark with depth impenetrable to the eye.
The grit and fury split the world in two, with haunted trees denuded of their leaves. The houses silhouetted by the view of such a force that threatens all that breathes.
As quickly as it came it struck no more, the night remained untainted by its thrust, and all that stalked the darkness as before returned to living as they always must.
Glenis has been writing poetry since the first Covid lockdown and does her writing at night as she suffers from insomnia. When she is not writing poetry she makes beaded jewellery, reads, and sometimes runs 10K races slowly. She has been published by Dreich, Dust Poetry, and Wildfire Words.
Bill to Gross A cinched Flame threw – – – – – form – – – – – MOAN a Lease A attacked forbearance wheelbarrow (un)avoid(able) conflict Negation therapy – – – – – pursuit phobia stoic branch – – – – – happy harpy made a Pen Is never underworked hairy chest heave X- Ray tape measure treasure
Tart Mayhem Brick
new release PeR gloved hand FuLL steam shipping label cut upward featured Wrist home in pigeon foRt short hOpe In hAlf maverick round UP supper formulation ProTecTed d e g r e e
Rate Reek Bikini
defamation triangulation doubt bricks speechless brother of a tonic spandex Tangent practice metal accessibility leak memorial speech fired expatriate acid steam intimate bAr WaX ed
asleep in the brambles
crisp snowflakes on the frontlines of global teddy bear wars
rainstorms with oats unforgettable suspenders
stretched like a mislaid zig zag of loch ness monster promenades
this prolonged wonderment spinning like a helicopter
awash in graceful varieties of limping
cashews shovelling gelatin racing down bankruptcy fingernails could grow six, seven, eight inches motorcycle attaché trifle snickering
the bunch of clumsy grapes punch a stage hymn
a dinosaur skeleton in cheap fabrication backsliding
Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library. He is member of C22, an experimental writing collective. He is the author most recently of the books peeping sardine fumes (RANGER Press) and [Ruptured] >> Schematic << MAZES (Sweat Drenched Press). He has had numerous pieces published in various journals.
You can find more of Joshua’s work here on Ink Pantry.
O congenial queen of Autumn! Why so sweet of all flowers? Tall in height, colour so bright! Venerations of all walks in life. Paradise on earth and for human beings. Primal ballerina for mellowest breeze, Crony of the ablaze sun And a guest of rainy season. One after another hour Full of motivations and fun For the worldly lasses and sons! O convivial queen of Autumn! Your farewell is so near Nearer than the poet’s pen On the paper filled with emotions!
Monalisa Parida is an assistant professor of English in Bhubaneswar College of Engineering, Jankia, Odisha, and a prolific poetess. She is very active on social media platforms and her poems have been translated into different languages and published in various e-journals.
She has 100 international awards for writing poetry. Her poems have been published in international e-journals “New York parrot”, “The Writers Club” (USA), “Suriyadoya literary foundation”, “kabita Minar”, “Indian Periodical” (India) and “Offline Thinker “, “The Gorkha Times “ ( Nepal), “The Light House”(Portugal), “Bharatvision”(Romania), “International cultural forum for humanity and creativity”(Aleppo, Syria), “Atunispoetry.com”(Singapore), also published in various newspapers like “The Punjabi Writer Weekly (USA)”, “News Kashmir (J&K, India)”, Republic of Sungurlu (Turkey)” etc.
One of her poems has been published in an American anthology named “The Literary Parrot Series-1 and series-2 respectively (New York, USA)”. Her poems have been translated into various languages like Hindi, Bengali, Turkish, Persian, Romanian etc. She is the author of the books “Search For Serenity”, “My Favourite Grammar”, “Paradigm”, and “Beyond Gorgeous”.
It was the 90s and I was in my 20s walking down Broadway on my way home when a man grabbed my boob and grinned as he passed by.
I was an unlikely candidate for groping with my A cup chest.
A woman watched the whole thing go down and asked, “Do you know him?”
I said, “No!”
Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Walking A&P and Black Elephants and three poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize.
sonnets of Michelangelo, those composed whilst on a limited folic acid intake, are so twisted in upon themselves they have become both water-resistant & washable. Even so, that insane artistry, the multiple narrative perspectives, the forward- thinking use of glass— all still tempt like fresh raspberries at the local store.
flirty singles, power players, & celebrities
It’s evident from the way that the angles of the owner’s jawbones
project that this laundromat is a reincarnation of the original late
night dance-spot where mansion chic & rock-star bach- elor pad collided.
adagio
Words come back to me — pizzicato, arco, bass clef — from that part of my past which has to do with music. Finger positions come back, the horsehair bow, & that upright
stance you have to adopt & adapt to with an instrument as big as yourself. Associat- ions come back, & favourite pieces — currently it’s the Concierto de Aranjuez that’s
picking its way across my forebrain. You might say everything comes back; but as long as time continues its inexorable march forward you know that will never be true.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. His most recent books are with the slow-paced turtle replaced by a fast fish, published by Sandy Press in May, 2023, & a free downloadable chapbook of visuals & poems, Mercator Projected, published by Half Day Moon Press in August 2023.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Another life story at the AA meeting. He began with the gullible stepfather, the mother’s fantasies, then
we heard about his unseen real father’s dominance, his adolescent interest in the spiritual life, his scorn for hire
purchase, his qualities of leadership. He loved to play tricks, hated violence, and although women adored him, men, too,
from all walks of life, he seemed celibate. He saw it coming, predicted it, when his own people betrayed him, crucified
him really. He would cry out for a drink, felt desperate when he thought he had been abandoned. One of his best mates denied
knowing him, and after he woke in a cave, alone, bleeding, left for dead, that was when he knew his life had hit rock bottom.
Commentators’ Team
Defence: I know that’s a cliché/ It’s a known fact/ It’s an arm wrestle/ Scoreboard pressure/ They’re under the pump/ Time’s ticking away.
Midfield: He needs to stand up and be counted/ A living legend/ On a learning curve/ A season-defining game/ Statistically speaking/ Where angels fear to tread.
Attack: Absolutely sensational/ He’s on fire/ Last roll of the dice/ No pain, no gain/ Through the eye of a needle/ Winners are grinners.
Interchange: Horribly wrong/ It’s a tragedy/ At the end of the day/ The bottom line.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Southword, Stand, & The Stony Thursday Book. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The night is an endless frustrating vast empty well into which I am continually falling but never reaching the bottom, never drawing closer to the malicious water.
At 2 am, I wake up, my body electric, my eyes watchful and alert and as far away from sleep as is possible.
I peek through the Venetian blinds that drape my window like eyes from a woebegone factory.
Yes, I peek through the blinds, and I see nothingness—the black and implacable and impenetrable and unforgiving night as thick and dark as a swamp.
I return to my bed, which lies alive with sheets wrinkled and puke green and sweaty, and I pound my pillow into smithereens and slam it against the headboard of my bed.
I try to read Kafka’s The Trial. Strange choice to seduce sleep, n’est-ce-pas? But the words on the filthy page are like worms that curl into opaqueness, and Kafka’s paragraphs elongate till they are as impenetrable as the swarthy night.
I blunder my way out of bed and stumble to the kitchen and pour myself a secret bowl of Cheerios and return to my bed and slurp the cereal and study the little O’s as if they held some sort of meaning,
And I hope and pray that the cereal will gird me for the long fight through the night to find rest and meaning in the nothingness of the dark.
The night is a boa constrictor wrapping itself around my soul and squeezing the life out of it.
I’ve had enough of Kafka’s prose, which is a dark impenetrable puzzling of malice and myth-making words of anomie and soullessness.
I turn off the silver metallic lamp by the bed and plunge into the blackest of the night so far.
The pillow feels like a memory that I no longer want to hang on to.
I toss and turn, feeling the sheets beneath me like iron, the pillow like the repository of lost hopes and dreams.
The night screams on, growing more tragic by the minute, by the second, like an evil and rambunctious dragon.
I levitate from the bed. The sheets burble with unforgiving sweat.
I toddle down the hallway to the bathroom and hang my dick like dirty laundry over the toilet bowl, which in the death of night resembles a huge gaping mouth yearning to swallow me whole.
Drip. Drip. Drip. The peeing finally comes to a denouement that is completely devoid of significance. Done. My body is thankfully empty of urine.
Back to the Shakespearean tragedy of the bed. 4 am. 4:30 am. 5 am. The minutes click by like sodden and lugubrious steps that one takes in some netherworld where sleep is not delineated, defined, or allowed.
Facing one way. Rolling over. Facing another way. My eyes as far from sleep as New York is from Capetown, as Pluto is from Earth.
Eyes alert, wired, steady, peering into the darkness and the future that lurks in that darkness,
And seeing nothingness. Peering. Staring. Unblinking. I lie strangling on the well-sweated sheets, the perspiring sheets,
And wait for a haunted sleep that promises never to come.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He has done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines.
You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.
blanket and sombrero dropped in a pile, she runs through a vacant city of gold, echoes thudding against eardrums, sweat pouring in a hum.
the priest rings a bell to the stirring dust, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, spits, walks back to the bottle and eats the worm.
she calls him father. he waves her in. their arms slow in the heat.
risky business
paintings locked in colour
and boulders in falling rock zones, never really falling.
you’ve never seen a pebble bounce or heard a hard crack and you know if you drive through this same threatening stretch of road every year and locate the same boulder on a precipitous ledge it will always be el cid dead on his horse which gives you something to talk about.
pigments are never diluted with water but seasons change your taste in fruits and vegetables and leave you nothing to choose at the market except endive and spinach. and the heavy green of one colour is a still life’s red tablecloth hung over the edge in perfect folds of shadowed smiles with teeth unseen
improving the drainage
walking along the street near my home where machines are putting in new sewers;
no humans to be seen here.
just yellow backhoes and orange cranes red dump trucks with windows layered in foggy brown and not a human within them, not a movement.
slabs of concrete and asphalt piled for a campfire, it seems;
smells captured under bulldozers and released as steam. a whole neighbourhood glued in chaos and coated in the sewage of wet dust.
walking past the detour signs and plastic blinking lights, generators thumping failing thumping.
home finally but not really there, crouched unsteadily on the sidedoor steps fingering spider webs, teasing apart the smells of bean soup and a flooded basement.
props
the old men who play chess in parks
rarely speaking, smoking tobacco spitting juice as young boys watch and run for sandwiches and coffee. as sun sprinkles through the trees just enough and the breeze folds a newspaper just enough.
i have never seen this.
the old men who wheeze and take pills, cough and lock in dentures before the sandwiches; piss themselves from the coffee. who wear safari hats and measure immortality with captured pawns.
i have never seen this.
except in movies grainy and frightening whose titles i forget.
soft landing
chocolate evening drips a candle of slow light. coffee, gurgling breath of steam aroma is harboured in dreams of unthinking skin. closed eyes and the exquisite deadness falls through murmurs of crossed and barricading arms. my hair is uncombed my breath is unwashed my heart is a trampoline (and not a pump) so warmth splashes randomly and grease flies from bacon but doesn’t burn;
a rare moment.
Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or, is forthcoming, in The Cardiff Review, The Cordite Review, Roi Faineant, North Dakota Quarterly, J Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and elsewhere.
(Inspired by “What I Believe” by Jacqueline Woodson)
I believe teriyaki chicken with rice tastes better than anything. I believe my grandma agreed. I believe God whispered to her our family teriyaki sauce recipe. I believe my father taught the secret to me to continue her legacy.
I believe I will continue her legacy by clothing every meat I eat with sweet teriyaki.
I believe my wife dislikes sweet meat. I believe that does not matter to me. I believe that does not matter to her either.
I believe our future children might not like it either. I believe my wife and I will dress their meat with teriyaki sauce anyway. I believe my children will eat teriyaki chicken with rice anyway.
I believe, if they like it, they might even learn the recipe and then forget it after eating too much McDonald’s or Wendy’s.
I believe, despite this possibility, they will still carry my grandma and father’s legacy. I believe they will even honour my wife and me
because
I believe they will see, just like anybody, that family is fitted with so much more meaning than chicken and rice in sweet teriyaki.
Caleb Delos-Santos (he/him) is an English graduate student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Throughout his four years of writing, Caleb has published poetry with nearly twenty literary magazines, including North Dakota Quarterly and the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, and most recently released his first two poetry collections, A Poet’s Perspective (2022) and Once One Discovers Love (2023). Caleb also won the 2022 Esselstrom Writing Prize and the West Wind Literary Magazine’s 2023 Best in Genre Award for his nonfiction. Today, Caleb teaches English 101 as a teaching assistant and dreams of a successful writing and teaching career.
When I walked into the room, they poured lava on my head and told me I was fired
but I couldn’t hear because of all the ash in my ears and the room was packed full
of people I didn’t know—a librarian who said I stole a book back in 1968, a penguin
who said I made half its family extinct, and my boss who looked like a hole in
an animal—and they were lined up, all with notebooks, all ready to slice me in
half, but I thanked them, because now is the time where all can collapse, so
you have to be gracious and smile and accept them shoving a mountain deep
into your guts, and I walked away after, heading nowhere, ending up in a grave-
yard where someone mowed the lawn like they had rivers of madness in their
lungs, just circling and spinning and weaving that machine into sand and
puddle and fence and I just stood there, jobless, watching this guy with a job,
tearing up the earth as if he wanted to erase every single thing in sight.
I’d chop off my eyes for a kiss
that’s how lonely my eyes are, my memories like rope, so god-
damn garden-level beautiful; I should have died for her, but
instead I just wrote poems. My God, I should have died and come
back to life. I should have done everything. Everything.
The magician who lives below me comes home
and looks wrecked, destroyed by magic, this slow trudge, and I’m a peeping tom, slits in the blinds, but so curious to see this
body, bedecked in motley, and so old and so young at the same time, a man-boy who’s never smoked, never drank, but greyed,
youth-aged, starving for money, gambling for fame, but coming home to this metal neighbourhood where crickets don’t even come,
just the soft sound of traffic in the distance, blending in with his footsteps, so tender, like rabbits that have been forgotten in hats.
I went to Niagara Falls
I didn’t get it. All that mist. I got back in my car and drove one thousand miles, to Kansas, where my ex- lives, happily, without me. I told her about Niagara. She drank coffee in her kitchen that was the colour of the Civil War. I said I didn’t get how people could go down that thing in a barrel. She told me her ex- would be home soon. They still lived together. Nothing in this world makes sense.
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Nanci Griffith’s “I Wish It Would Rain.”
