Keith Hoerner (BS, MFA) lives, teaches, and pushes words around in Southern Illinois, USA. He is frequently featured in lit journals (75+ to date, including decomP, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and Litro—to name just a few). He is founding editor of the Webby Award recognized Dribble Drabble Review, and his memoir, The Day the Sky Broke Open, is a recent Best Book and American Writing Award Finalist. A collection of short fiction and poetry, entitled Balancing on the Sharp Edges of Crescent Moons, publishes later this year.
You can find more of Keith’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Ten inches of wet Heart-attack snow Sits in the driveway. When we first came to Golden Pines My shovel was a shield Of pride and pleasure, unwilling To give in to the years, Eager to break out of restive days.
But Golden Pines does not want The 80-year-old guys shoveling snow, So, on this third day, I lounge in pajamas at noon, Working from my easy chair On paper tasks of little consequence, Saved up for such a time.
The snowplow has cleared the driveway now And we can get to the store, Past sooted, graying mounds that will remind me Of Pennsylvania. Later this afternoon I may try to Widen the path a bit.
For Jeremy at Fifteen
The life of a friend, a teammate, Ended Suddenly, inexplicably: You honoured him by playing hard, By standing for him In the chancel, All of you, your uniforms Still damp from trying, As if you did not already know Of the fragileness of life.
Closing up the Cottage
1) September 2020 Our daughter came back up To help close the cottage. We sat down and watched her Wash the refrigerator.
82-year-old bones ache From cleaning, packing, lifting, Awaiting the subtle vibrations Of two days on the road.
We stood one cold morning By the side of The Third Connecticut Lake Wondering which would be The penultimate trip north.
Back at Golden Pines We are trying this morning To remember where and how We store things for the winter, The TV, the toaster, Computer, coffee maker.
2) September 1986 My dad’s last summer on the pond I flew up Labor Day To help close up, drive them home. The airport bus Only came as far as Dover. Somehow they managed to get there, Him wandering around the restaurant, Agitated, My mother with the Caregiver’s exhausted sadness. The restaurant is still there, Different name, different owners: I pass by that place And still feel An unbidden welling up, How one thing comes To stand for another.
Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Fore Coppers for a Bluebird Fasting at her house means drinking only beer Well worth the money buying her gear Picking your pocket like a Blackbird Mozart’s Twelfth Mass moody as absurd Two out of Eighty can’t hear With a second to spare, herds of deer Muttered facial expressions heard
Herds of Deer
Without care, herds of deer He muttered expressions heard Brushing swathe of might Too weak on his pins to go all the way Whale with a harpoon hairpin light Last words on the cross to pray His creation Lord of light Chairs upside down in the field
Sonnet CCCXXVIII
At day break maze of dark will be gone Unable to read chalk scrawled back door tonight Her joust of life at first light Human shell’s crucified shirts chiffon Dishonours of their flesh at the Pentagon Outcast man’s high mined appetite Weak wasting hand confessional Fahrenheit Quacking Soul’s utter triviality fawn Spiritual eager anticipation to fly Solemnities slightly ironical glee Hymn to heavenly beauty horrify Church yard behind the tree our favorite place to pee White Biscuit tin’s pie Last swig of the pint to be
Eyes of a Raccoon
White Ivory fur sea cold eyes of a raccoon Deep looms of sea’s moon on Halloween Making friends without half trying Limp as a wet rag nobbling his beer Blue Trousers and a white alabaster shirt Red nose rag old sloppy eyes guzzler Like holding water in her hand not his The moon sets before the clock strikes twelve
Kiss of a Queen
Pink articulated lips, kiss of a Queen Double dark increasing vaster Moon Stood pale silent by a Bee was stung at noon Said over her shoulder drinking perfect caffeine English steams of coffee from her canteen Tide sheeting the lows of the Green Lagoon Ivory fur, sea cold eyes of a raccoon Deep velvet of sea’s moon light on Halloween
Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. Has Five Amazon E- Books. Poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed. Winamop, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, Adelaide Magazine, Variant, the Writing Disorder, Ink Pantry, In Parentheses, Ariel Chat, New Ulster, Glove, and in Pamp-le-mousse, North Dakota Quarterly, Barzakh, Urban Arts, Wingless Dreamer, LKMNDS and Milk Carton Press.
You can find more of Terry’s work here on Ink Pantry.
twisted figures function like toothpicks ponder subjugation circles in village colour self the pants principle to grammatical tense through wacky intrusive logic shocked centers propulsive reflections fascinate like attraction limit quirk to linguistic subterfuge thick unshakeable compelled repeated picking margins flattening refuge arbitrarily insecure familiar narrative a flapping elusive still closer removing modular chances drawn fueled debunked concluded as a presence
Affected Collagen Dissolving
The meandering centipede invokes Hollywood Squares as a scare tactic.
Paranoia pleases chess masters leaving moldy clock on the train, better to save a parenthesis than shout at a letterbox perforation.
Performed a molecular transfer without a stable anchor to hook the syncopated suffix to a mattress.
Intuitive clown car, superstitions recline, struggle to keep profits, though mostly that’s just the bubble to the soap.
Transient Substation Oxygen
Weak atom cannot function in symbolic sleepwalking a — Part , space that bears currency daydream.
Interior of a protein, clever funhouse weigh station preserving charmless war machine.
For the sake of a dimple, awaken before midnight & bemuse prophylactic enzymes.
Linear Absorption
Uptight boogie burglar staking claim to road diets, starting tomorrow, awash in verbal gymnastics, downward facing nylon.
String pulling organic CPR through senior living facilities before releasing scarecrow into unsuspecting public lavatory crusaders.
Meaning of a phosphorous alpine ski lift?
Tertiary bromide emitting necrophilia at sunset?
Packed tightly in hyperbolic acid constant as an equilibrium milkshake, seizing conjugated saddle, high-pressure horse running washing machine aftershave without brain embolism song.
terrestrial
crux influx your typewriter carrier pigeon reverberates goop
famished TIDES pulled AsundeR laughter called NameD X in parabolic etch
sink yet who sink rotting fathomed barnacle speech
multi -use -faceted -modal -hyphenate -step -factor -level
ruled recycled printS curved wall PLASTER end of NaMe blame GaMe tick BiTe
Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library. He is the author of the books automatic message (Free Lines Press), combustible panoramic twists (Trainwreck Press), Pointillistic Venetian Blinds (Alien Buddha Press) and Vagabond fragments of a hole (Schism Neuronics). He has had numerous pieces published in various journals including Otoliths, M58, The Sparrow’s Trombone, Coven, Scud, Ygdrasil, RASPUTIN, Ink Pantry, and Synchronized Chaos.
Don’t like going into stores prefer sitting outside on a bench waiting for her to come out.
Sometimes you don’t feel like talking about anything answering questions, hearing excuses, explaining yourself you don’t want discussions or lectures don’t need the sharing of ideas or opinions, anecdotes, or dreams.
Sometimes you simply want to sit alone in your rocking chair in your quiet little room stare out the window into the street at nothing in particular for hours like grandpa used to do.
Rotator Cuff Repair Blues
I should sound stronger, confident when instead it’s still the same old blah, blah, blah.
Thanks for checking in the shoulder thing has been a long grind I do now recommend breaking your shoulder any time for any reason Monday I check-in with the surgeon see if I can do away with the sling and stop sleeping in the recliner trouble is it’s hard to tell if the damn thing is healing as it should I’m hoping the fancy-pants hotshot surgeon can determine that been doing the best I can on the poetry front everything takes twice as long because I can only use my left hand but I do what I can juggling trying to move forward on 7 projects my head a wellspring of projects hopefully one of them will jump out and take charge of the confusion but really I shouldn’t be such a complainer remind myself it can always be worse my beautiful wife hasn’t yet run off with that hunky UPS guy!!!
Words
. . . a nightmare trying to organize all this damn writing . . .
Of course I keep a writer’s notebook one of those old-fashioned black and white covered college ruled notebooks. I do my “creative writing” in there: poems and bits of prose and prose poems and hybrids of poems and prose. I write in there at night before sleeping and while sitting in the car waiting at the airport or the school or while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room or in hotel lobbies or at the grandson’s basketball practice . . . you’d be surprised how much writing you can get done in between everything else. I don’t draw pictures or symbols, hieroglyphics, or images of any kind I don’t doodle, it’s all just words simple old words.
Diagnostics
. . . mathematics is postulating that we might be able to travel backwards in time through wormholes . . .
Dad, if you returned to life after being gone 58 years I wonder what you’d find most surprising. Because you were a car mechanic and loved cars particularly your Buicks I suspect seeing how far car technology and style has come would make your head spin. Don’t know where to begin explaining it to you: power steering, airbags, automatic windows pushbutton ignition, CD players, GPS . . . I’m not even getting into car diagnostics by hooking it up to a computer when you could tell what was wrong with any old engine simply by cocking your head back and listening.
From Nothing
. . . they dreamed of being together never apart until the end of time . . .
Physicists, astrophysicists, geophysicists, astrobiologists astronomers, cosmologists . . . all of them state it like it’s clear, obvious irrefutable – in the beginning of the universe there was nothing, nothing at all no space, no time, no matter, no energy, only emptiness. Then suddenly out of the darkness out of nowhere for no reason like someone flipping a switch an infinitesimally small speck of something-or-other appeared then immediately exploded into the Big Bang BOOM!!! And the universe – everything there is or was or ever shall be – spiral galaxies, dwarf stars, planets, comets, asteroids, black holes, quasars, quarks, dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos gamma rays, leptons, red giants, globular clusters gravitons, photons, electrons, mesons, and the Higgs Boson – was formed just like that, from nothing absolutely nothing. Seriously?
You can find more of Michael’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The water enraptures my body, which feels like forest-shrouded silk As I clip and clop my awkward way through the water And then suddenly feel like a dolphin. The underneath of Walden Pond is riven by rivers of currents birthed from mysterious sources. As I swim, the current changes from foot to foot, now alienating cold, now feathery warm The currents caress my body like eels that brush their liquid bodies against my chest, torso, groin, legs,
tingling and tangling all up and down my skin, shagging me, changing me, freeing me. I slow down, feel the water like echoes of the past, Know that Thoreau swam and fished and walked and lived here. I feel the sensuous caress of history, of self-reflection, of rebellion against the ordinary. The electric call of infinite Walden seduces me with its sweet and subterranean melody, Like the trapezer who paints the last act. I swim past the why current, Feel the fins of curious fish brushing me. None knows really how deep Walden is, Or what the source of the pond is. It was born eons ago in the distant primordial past of the past of the earth, Born in the majestic ruptures of the earth, Born in the thousand-yard-deep chaos of water and stars, Lifeless at first, then slowly emerging in the slow movement of unforgiving atoms and aimless instincts And meandering, sensuous being.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He was a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. 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. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published my his book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.
flags aloft and a thief’s mouth gnashing atop the masthead
glimpsed from orbit bombs mistaken for flowers of love
navigating the anthills of Europe as well
will we ever see the last of us
Weekend
we hike through Muir amidst sequoia and unsung bluebell. lured by pounding Pacific, beached jellyfish shimmering.
barefoot as clouds or scudding dreams.
as all roads slim to trails, as springs to rivers, to oceans, to saltless precipitate, firmly destabilized, hungering,
as cyclones ravaging the landscape are wont to be.
Jay Passer‘s work has appeared in print and online periodicals and anthologies since 1988. He is the author of 12 collections of poetry and prose, most recently The Cineaste (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). Passer lives in San Francisco, the city of his birth.
Pass me on streets disturbed, anguished, or sunk in unpayable debts of yesterdays or tomorrow’s that begin with light and end with dark voids lacking the velvet softness of dreams of the unfamiliar shadings of hope.
But today I see a man on a mild and pleasant day wearing several sweaters, shirts, and pants.
His smile so genuine I wanted to buy him a suitcase.
Two corner boys higher than a trapeze artist decide to play him for sport, shouting: hey old timer what you gonna do when it gets cold?
With the friendliest of smiles, he stops thinks, then answers I’ll put on some more clothes.
This Idiot and a Half
Almost caught me stepping out of my apartment building in the middle of the day on some kind of motorized scooter on the goddamned sidewalk. You asshole! I yelled He looked back, but kept on going down the block into the street and gone.
Had his bike hit me I would have been in the hospital with something broken maybe more than one thing.
Some men dream of blondes built like starlets, yet delicate as a baby’s breath.
Others dream of enough gold to remake the entire world with their name everywhere.
Or they want to be president, but really mean dictator.
Me, I’ve simple tastes I’d like to catch one of these motorbike idiots speeding on sidewalks and stiff arm them into tomorrow with their bodies going one way and their bikes another.
Then just leave them there opened mouthed and confused. Not a lot to ask for, but failing that I’ll take the blonde and a few gold ducats.
5:35 am
Daylight is an hour away, so I finish the last of five poems, go to the kitchen and find sausage and eggs, then check the mail and discover none. It’s now 5:47 am, still dark. I seldom drink coffee before 6. I read the poems and wait. It’s the exciting life of a poet in New York city.
Rp Verlaine, a retired English teacher living in New York City, has an MFA in creative writing from City College. He has several collections of poetry including Femme Fatales, Movie Starlets & Rockers (2018), and Lies From The Autobiography 1-3 (2018-2020).
You can find more of Rp’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Up there a helicopter herds cows to safety while the hills are dowsed by tiny firefighters; down here I pour boiling water on an ants’ nest and scan the rivulets to slaughter survivors.
Ray Miller is a Socialist, Aston Villa supporter, and faithful husband. Life’s been a disappointment.
You can find more of Ray’s work here on Ink Pantry.
