Merideth M. Taylor

October 2019 | visual art

Vitus Riparia 1

Vitus Riparia 1

 

Vitus Riparia 2

Vitus Riparia 2

 

Vitus Riparia 3

Vitus Riparia 3

 

Vitus Riparia 4

Vitus Riparia 4

 

Merideth M. Taylor

Merideth Taylor is professor emerita of theater and dance at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In 2018, she published a book of photographs and stories titled Listening In: Echoes and Artifacts from Maryland’s Mother County. George F. Thompson Publisher. She is happy to now have time to wander in the woods and discover nature’s wonders on the micro level, including the common grape: green tendrils in spring and small sculptural characters in winter.

Era Not of War

October 2019 | poetry

We’ve come out of the dust

in our mother tongue

not to praise the people

with astronomical hoards of bucks

and numbers, but those who’ve risen

out of volcanic ashes, those pushed

into labors for biddings not theirs,

who’re capable of envisioning peace

between nations when negotiations

take work with credible research

and willingness to hear clearly,

while a missile fires off at the twitch

of a ring finger. We’re here to give

our piece to the masters of war

who may be disinterested in seeing

what’s before them, as they duck

responsibility for the consequences

of their acts just to maximize profit.

Every day the masters of war fight

the human consensus, masters who,

stumbling upon disputes, provide

not wisdom but lethal arms to every

side, who in the face of Earth’s limits

of materials wage their public war

for control and to gut education.

And yet we’re here to recognize

those who’ve stood for peaceful

coexistence, who understand links

of firing off a missile to destruction

on the ground, who can envision

many years of peace, with altruism

toward those in need, and not forget

that war is a catastrophic collapse.

 

James Grabill

James Grabill’s work appears in Caliban, Harvard Review, Terrain, Mobius, Shenandoah, Seattle Review, Stand, and many others. Books – Poem Rising Out of the Earth (1994), An Indigo Scent after the Rain (2003), Lynx House Press. Environmental prose poems, Sea-Level Nerve: Books One (2014), Two (2015), Wordcraft of Oregon. For many years, he taught all kinds of writing as well as “systems thinking” and global issues relative to sustainability.

Charles Springer

October 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

Inauguration Day

Wife calls me from her cell, says all the way to work whitetails lined the roadway, four and five deep in places, says they looked like passengers behind the line to board a train. I remind her that today’s the day the governor comes to town with his entourage and motorcade. I ask her if she saw the rabbits. Come to think of it, she says, it did look like the doe were wearing fuzzy slippers. And were there birds perched atop bucks’ antlers? Hundreds, maybe thousands, in the voice she gathers for amazement. She asks if they’ve all left their nests to greet the governor as he passes. I tell her each and every creature have been summoned for extinction. Did you not see the front end loaders, dump trucks in the background? Silly me, she says, you’re right, always with a new administration.

 

Acknowledgments

First Friday, and I am only visually deconstructing a mixed medium while sipping a snappy little chardonnay and blowing foam through my minced bologna when I trip over my own two feet and slice a piece of thigh on the slivers, squirt blood floor to ceiling on a new white wall and spectators gather while I text for an Uber to Urgent Care to get stitched up, then return to where everyone surrounds me like iron filings on a north magnetic pole, not out of concern for my accident but in awe of it although Pollock would deny the accident and I am gracious and even a bit proud yet properly acknowledge the on-call physician’s assistant, the glassblower, the grape stomper, the casing stuffer skyping from a range of locations and of course, my parents in assisted living for their feet in this.

 

Charles Springer

Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is published in over seventy journals including The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Windsor Review, Packingtown Review and Tar River Poetry, among others. His first collection of poems entitled Juice is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. He writes from Pennsylvania.

Ffestiniog 1974

October 2019 | fiction

When you are fourteen, you and three friends spend two weeks hiking in Snowdonia.

One day you descend from the mountains and wander into the mining town of Ffestiniog. You enter a sweet shop and joke around with your pals as you wait in the queue at the counter. A huge slate miner buying a pound of Jelly Babies looks over his shoulder and gives you a funny look.

Outside, you are greeted by the miner and his seven massive friends. They form a semicircle around you and hem you in against an iron fence. No way out. Each miner looks like he could break all four of you in half with one arm. The ringleader—the one from the shop—says you were making fun of him for speaking Welsh. Very diplomatically, you say you were not making fun of him for speaking Welsh.

“Yes, you were,” he says.

Two of his friends unhook their belts. Heavy buckles clink on pavement. The miner is saying Welsh people don’t like being made fun of for being Welsh.

“Do we, Fellas?”

His mates agree. They start to shuffle forward.

Speech, you realize, is all that can save you. Strangely automatic, your mouth opens and emits a string of words.

“We ken wotzwot. We dunna mess wiv men az ard az rock. Any one a yo lot could smash uz inter bitz.”

The leader’s expression changes. A puzzled look appears on his face. His head moves slightly to the side. He holds up a hand to halt his mates.

“You be speakin with an accent, Boyo!” he says. “Where you be from then?”

All of you answer in chorus.

“Manchester!”

At the sound of the word, the miners take a step back, and—incredibly—smile.

“Manchester?” says the leader cautiously. “I don’t be supposin you be United fans by any chance?”

All of you say that yes you are United fans.

“Right!” the leader says with a swipe of his paw. “Everything’s all right then! We won’t be messin with no United fans—will we Fellas?”

His pals shake their heads. The two with the belts fasten them back around their waists. The leader has the last words.

“Just don’t be makin no fun a the Welsh!” he says as they let you pass.

You are all walking briskly towards the mountains when he calls after you.

“And Keep Wales Tidy!”

 

Mark Crimmins

Mark Crimmins’s fiction was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a 2015 Best of the Net Award, and a 2015 Silver Pen Authors Association Write Well Award. His short stories have been published in Confrontation, Prick of the Spindle, Eclectica, Cortland Review, Tampa Review, Columbia, Queen’s Quarterly, Apalachee Review, Pif Magazine, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. His flash fictions have been published in Eunoia Review, Flash Frontier, Portland Review, Gravel, Eastlit, Restless Magazine, Atticus Review, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Dogzplot, Spelk, Long Exposure, Chaleur, Pure Slush, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.

A Sound of Wings

October 2019 | poetry

We pretend having our life,

even world’s life, always under control,

from past generations to present days.

Sometimes we feel close to that certainty,

and it is good that this should happen,

giving us some encouragement on the route.

We work with the mind and the heart,

science and desire, on outlining the future,

which we anticipate promising and happy.

Skirting around life’s corners, every so often,

we are faced with frightening facts,

perhaps echoes of ancient Greek tragedies,

poor of hope in the human renaissance.

Wars, revolutions, tyrannies and persecutions,

born on the drumming of soulless men,

have delayed landing in the promised land,

where milk and honey spur and light reigns,

preventing all evil once sown.

But we are already listening

the beating of the wings of the dove’s return,

like those of Noah, bringing in its beak

the green branch of the olive tree.

 

Edilson Afonso Ferreira

Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 75 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Largely published in international journals in print and online, he began writing at age 67, after retirement as a bank employee. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2017, his first Poetry Collection, Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in London, November 2018. He is always updating his works at www.edilsonmeloferreira.com.