April 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
When she said that,
I think she has never tasted how a good Irish whiskey
echoes in your mouth after you swallow its heat.
Or understood the way lint can reveal the archeology of your life.
Her comment tells me she has never watched
a vivid crimson cardinal alight on the halo of a basketball hoop
in the fading light of an afternoon.
If she can say that, I’m sure she hasn’t felt the love
when the wind caresses the yew tree.
And she will be mystified by why you must throw away
the first crepe in the pan to the dog.
When it comes to believing in the curative power
of the medicine of tears, she probably doesn’t.
And if she cannot hear how the meter of the telegraphic SOS
from the Titanic can truly break your heart,
She’s just not listening hard enough.
Larry Oakner is the author of three chapbooks of poems, including Unwinding the Words (Blind Tattoo Press) SEX LOVE RELIGION (Blind Tattoo Press), and The 614th Commandment (under his pseudonym, Eleazar Baruch), along with a chapbook, The Canticles of Private Lucius Swan, (Pen & Anvil Press). Over 50 of his poems have appeared in publications such as The Ekphrastic Review, Red Eft Review, Red Wolf Press, WINK, The Oddville Press, Tricycle: Buddhist News, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lost Coast Review, The Long Island Quarterly, and many others.
Larry Oakner
April 2024 | poetry
Indoctrinating myself
I shuffle towards the polls
And pull the lever
Expecting a trapdoor to open up
And plunge me into the awaiting waters below
The Styx or just a secret underground channel
Leading perhaps to the East River
They’re both abysmal passages
Whichever way you cut it
But some abysses lead to an absence you can’t come back from
So I guess decisions matter
Occasionally
Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in 77 issues of 35 different magazines, including Burningword Literary Journal, Tacenda, The Bohemian, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, Free State Review, and DASH Literary Journal. A short story has been published in blazeVOX. He’s written three novels and five screenplays. His film was successfully screened at Santa Cruz and Short Film Corner of Cannes film festivals.
Josef Krebs
April 2024 | nonfiction
Lisa sends me this long text grumbling about her husband and how he’s informed her he can’t handle Taco Tuesdays anymore and now she must redo her ENTIRE menu for January because the selfish bastard can’t deal with spicy food, and I’m thinking, damn. You’re lying in the morgue waiting on someone to perform your autopsy, and the least she can do is wait until we know if you were drunk behind the wheel when you slammed into another car and were thrown through the windshield of your own because you weren’t wearing a seatbelt. She’s railing about her prickly-assed husband while you are dead-dead-dead, along with your brother who is dead-dead-dead, and my husband-your-uncle who is dead-dead-dead, but I am calm. Ice-water-in-the-veins calm. Because who gets to tell my daughter about these grisly events? Who informs Bonnie that her dad shot himself or Cousin Josh’s heart fritzed out in the bathroom or you bought it on the gravel-studded pavement near El Salido Pkwy on the northeast side of Austin, Texas? The pleasure’s mine. I phone her tonight just before Lisa chimes in with her news and I think, damn. Her nag of a husband is alive. What does she have to complain about?
Cindy Sams is a teacher and writer in Macon, GA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Reinhardt University with an emphasis on Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Brevity Nonfiction blog, Pangyrus LitMag, High Shelf Press, The Chaffey Review, Canyon Voices Literary Magazine, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and The New Southern Fugitives, which nominated her for a 2020 Pushcart Prize.
Cindy Sams
April 2024 | fiction
Remember Twiggy, her skeletal body was all the rave. That led us to
Form the V Club. Teachers thought we meant Glee club. (Not V for Vomit)
It wasn’t until three 8th grade girls were taken away in an ambulance that
the school got wise. I was called the Ring Leader which made me hear tinny
circus music.
My curvy mom came to see the school counselor with me.
The counselor said, (no kidding, her words exactly),
“Oh, now I get it, you’re Italian and predisposed to fat, pasta fat.
My mom smiled and replied, Yes, me and Sophia Loren.
Gloria’s published novel, The Killing Jar, is about one of the youngest Americans to serve on death row. Her memoir Learning from Lady Chatterley deals with her life growing up in Detroit. Breathe Me a Sky was published by the Moonstone Arts Center, and a collection of her poetry entitled The Dark Safekeeping, a chapbook, was published by Mayapple Press in 2022. She has published poems, essays, and pedagogical chapters in mainstream presses and literary journals. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in The Longridge non-fiction contest.
Gloria Demasi Nixon-John
April 2024 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
I hear a shotgun crack and find mother
at the woodpile—she’s shot another rat snake.
“But,” I say, “they keep the rabbit population down?”
“I like rabbits,” is her reply. “But your garden,” I say.
“Nothing anyone can do about that,” she sighs.
Here, it’s rabbits everywhere, all the time.
It’s like my brain conducts this leporine improvisation
of a to-and-fro mind, of a heart running for cover,
of jumpy, interrogative eyes.
When I mow the fields they watch me, race by my side.
When I search the night for satellites standing mother’s
living garden, there’s always one or two bunnies there,
piebald hearts beneath a half-stoned moon, stunned.
Rabbits manage nests from their own hair mixed with
scratched out soil. There’s one by the split elm, another
in the clover beneath a pram carrying eight kinds of mint.
Mom finds a new nest beneath the Muhly grass’s
pink pencil-troll head. We count nine newborn rabbits
pulsing as one like the heart Kate and I watched together
on a sonogram screen in a small, dim basement room.
I walk away and stand between two sunflowers tall as me.
I’ve caught them at the end of their conversation. One
sunflower says, “I am greater than or equal to the lack
and luck is weather that permits my red begonias.”
I count seven sunflowers, heads perfect size to be arranged
in a vase for an anniversary, but I let their necks hang free,
bent down toward one another, yellow, green, and brown.
Eric Roy is the author of All Small Planes (Lily Poetry Review Press 2021), which received the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominations for its hybrid writing. His recent work can be found or is forthcoming at Bennington Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Salamander, Third Coast, and elsewhere.
Eric Roy
