Michael Karl Ritchie

October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Chess

 

Inside one Russian doll is another,

dressed in a different nationality

and inside that one is yet another.

 

and so on until all of them

gang up and storm the opera house

demanding to see the mayor.

 

Which of them crossed the border

may depend on fingerprints

and the next referendum.

 

As one nation collapses,

another rises up from the same dolls,

each a pawn in a clever sacrifice.

 

  

Flatliners

 

So now the earth is flat

Since nothing’s truly round

Not even a plutocrat

Rolls without a sound

 

On wildlife habitat

Hydraulic drilling pounds

Skinning mountains flat

Unearthing sacred mounds

 

The Fed’s still keeping track

Of stocks that leap and bound

Payback for any kickback

Their graphs are never round.

 

In jazz clubs singers scat

Audiences spellbound

Because the earth is flat

Keep both feet on the ground

 

by Michael Karl Ritchie

Michael Karl Ritchie is a retired Professor of English from Arkansas Tech University with work published in various small press magazines, including The Mississippi Review, Margie, OR Panthology – Ocellus Reseau. He has had three small press chapbook publications and Winter Goose Press has just published his collection of poems Ampleforth’s Miscellany (2017).

 

 

Solitary

October 2018 | visual art

Solitary

 

by Jing Lin

In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, in which she is portraying a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see? Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA. https://www.jinglinphotography.com

Heath Brougher, Featured Author

October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Eyeless

 

When your eyes suddenly fell out,

leaving you blind as a bowl of soup,

you frantically began feeling around the floor.

 

On your hands and knees, crawling carefully

to make sure you didn’t crush

one of them with your four-legged steps.

 

Feeling nothing but grunge and grime on the that old linoleum,

you became more panicked with each passing second,

realizing, now that your eyes have fallen out,

just how filthy this world has truly become.

 

 

Noisy Noose

 

The spirit has slowly evaporated,

gradually turned jaded throughout the years,

quelled, wrecked by the jarring persistence of cacophony

that pours through the veins and hallways of this world.

Inspiration melted to a feeble pulp by the noisy noose

of the boisterous trucks and verbose dogs

that populate the neighborhood, filling the air,

the never-silent wind, with an incessant clamor.

 

The poet’s soul will soon be laid to rest among the din.

 

 

The Prevalence of Nothingness

 

Churning the nothingness into a somethingness

is tried. Doesn’t work.

Maybe half-works since I see

kids gathered

in the abandoned parking lot.

It’s like they’re living my youth

which allows me to vicariously relive it myself.

Hail pours from the sky.

Gravity still works.

That is, at least, for now.

 

by Heath Brougher

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Magazine. He is a multiple nominee for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. His newest book is “To Burn in Torturous Algorithms” (Weasel Press, 2018). His work has appeared in journals such as Taj Mahal Review, Chiron Review, MiPOesias, and Main Street Rag.

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

October 2018 | visual art

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

 

by Ben Erlandson

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is a perpetual skeptic, longitudinal thinker, brewer, gardener, photographer, learning systems designer, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Combinations of his efforts often manifest as technology, visual media, and printable narrative. Having tried nearly every platter on the capitalist corporate industrial buffet, he’s just not found anything to his liking. He spends quite a bit of time in the mountains and rivers instead. Mostly on foot. Dr. Erlandson has published extensively in academia, including several peer-reviewed articles and co-authorship of the graduate-level textbook Design For Learning In Virtual Worlds. He has self-published the narrative nonfiction work Winter South 02014, about a road trip from California back to his home state of North Carolina. With another nonfiction project in the works, he switches gears between fiction, nonfiction, and photography to keep his mind limber. He’s been shooting for more than twenty-five years and writing creatively for more than thirty. Born and raised in Elkin, North Carolina, Ben has degrees from UNC-Asheville, Emerson College, and Arizona State University, and has lived and worked in Asheville, Boston, Tempe, Monterey Bay, Berkeley, and Washington, DC. He currently resides in Glade Valley, North Carolina, and hopes to build an ecological homestead, or just travel around the North American continent on foot, bicycle, and touring kayak, practicing photography and telling stories.

My Last Screenplay

October 2018 | poetry

Whatever they wanted; I didn’t care one way or the other.

I didn’t care if the handicapped wife fell in the well

or the bad guy said he’d save her and didn’t

Or when later, her so over souped corpse

(this discretely off-camera)

was falling off the bone

And the righteous husband, asked by the honest retriever

if he wanted the head…

Take it or leave it, made no never mind to me.

Then…in the distance…the masked rider

galloping towards us

a savior, female,

the tension palpable as she nears…

(think Meryl Streep I’m told)

Could it be?

The return of the white hair woman!

Note for revision:

Introduce white hair woman before her return.

The righteous husband heads off with his young’ns and

the white hair woman to high prairie climes

dusted with snow and newly minted men.

Everything there is for the taking.

Everyone’s a pioneer.

And no one ever goes to the movies.

 

by Mark Stein

Mark Stein’s poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Exposition Review, Eclectica, Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Madison Review and Moment. His plays have been produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville, South Coast Repertory, Manitoba Theatre Centre, LA’s Fountain Theater, and most recently an award-winning production at Chicago’s Raven Theater of Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys. He wrote the screenplay for the Steve Martin/Goldie Hawn film, Housesitter, and the New York Times Best Seller, How the States Got Their Shapes, which became the basis for a History Channel series by the same name. His other non-fiction books include American Panic: A History of Who Scares Us and Why; Vice Capades: Sex, Drugs, and Bowling from the Pilgrims to the Present.