Interview

January 2025 | poetry

It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine…

Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance.

So, you’ve made it at last to the back of the line

and the candidate worth just a cursory glance?

 

Inconspicuous as the invisible man,

I’ve a resume anyone sane would ignore.

For occasions like this, I attend cap in hand

as I beg for your payroll’s umbilical cord.

 

My most recent employment?  I ran out of luck.

I was blamed for regrettable downturns, you see?

There’s a slope to my shoulders but passing the buck

is a little proactive for someone like me.

 

I’m the figure the folk in the staffroom lampoon

and the name on the rota that’s read with a smirk,

like I’ve stepped on a rake in a children’s cartoon,

I’m the butt of the joke for my colleagues at work.

 

While the suited and booted show brazen contempt,

I’m cold-shouldered by even the uniformed drones

but I’ve not got the courage to make an attempt

at sustaining an income by working from home.

 

A perennial misfit, I can’t find a match

for my dubious talents and limited skills

so the word on the street’s that I’m not up to scratch

and there’s no kind of post I’d successfully fill.

 

I’m an abracadabra away from my goals

(or perhaps it’s Hey Presto! away from my dreams).

My inadequacies are consistently droll

if I’m not indispensably linked to your team.

 

And so thanks for the great opportunity Miss

but I sense that I haven’t impressed you at all

and this isn’t a fairytale plot with a twist

so I won’t hold my breath while I wait for your call.

 

Chris Scriven

Chris’ poetry is heavily influenced by his own lived experience of mental health issues, although it is frequently also underpinned by an (often dark) sense of humor. As he lives in the UK, his poems have predominantly appeared in UK-based magazines and journals such as Acumen, Orbis, and The Frogmore Papers, among others.

Jean Wolff

January 2025 | visual art

WhiteBokeh

 

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 153 works in 104 issues of 61 magazines. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, and studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She received a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY, in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.

Unbidden Image

January 2025 | poetry

I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our

living room like uninvited guests at a party

 

waiting with my wife in case her heart attack

arrives before the ambulance does, each man

 

scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might

burst from a bookcase, can’t unsee them monitoring

 

the way she probes her neck and shoulder and jaw

for a sign of the fuses a coronary lights in a woman’s

 

body, the young one unpacking the defibrillator,

flattening the blue patches that attach to the chest.

 

How strange that pain has a photographic memory.

Unbidden image imbued with new life. The past

 

always hijacking the present, my wife ever lifted

into the ambulance, the door closing between us.

 

Ken Hines

Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that take getting through to people who may not be listening. His poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, and Dunes Review, among others. You’ll find his essays in The Millions, Philosophy Now, and Barrelhouse. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife Fran.

Local Boys

January 2025 | fiction

In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man, the veteran of bar room scraps, now weathering twenty-six, knew, like the other two, that hostilities were over, that the lights were out at last on the theatres of war.

The theatre was part of home for lanky Tim. For five, six years pre-war, he’d done amdram. He had the wavy hair, indeed the coaxing smile of a film star, so in the local Little Theatre, he could charm the ladies, court the audiences, bask in the warm reviews. But for six years nearly (Tim was thirty-two in a fortnight’s time), he had found, in conflict and in barrack room, you got to see the truth of fellow men, naked and in the raw. He was thinking rather differently now, of men and audiences and acting and affection. Post-war things would be difficult for him and only finally, decades on, would he reach a personal peace.

Spencer had married back in ’41, and yes, he was looking forward to going back to Lily. There was the physical part, of course, the regularity, and in the years that followed he would settle, despite the criss-cross and the alleyways of love, for what was more or less OK. He’d think of her, always, as ‘the Missus’, just as he’d think of ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. And decades on, when the cancer struck, he would cope and care for Lily with a dour devotion.

David was bound to think, on that journey home, of the breathless Rachel, the schoolgirl daughter of his mother’s friend. She’d been there at their house, on each of his leaves, and he knew full well she loved him blatantly. Everything in him, of manhood, pride and celebration, yearned for her. Yet somehow now, post-war, aged twenty-two, she not quite seventeen, he would keep feeling the gulf between all he’d seen, the nauseous blood, the gristle exposed, and the world of the child. So they would circle each other for several tremulous months, before in time they panicked and married others.

Each married a shit. Only after many, many years, after the bitterness, the blows, the pettiness, were they free, their every emotion rising with a rush.

In 1995, the celebrations marked the end of the war, and the following golden peace.  None of the boys attended. Spencer said, ‘I’m just glad I came back and I think of the boys who didn’t’. He stayed in playing rummy with Lily (recovered years ago but frail). Tim and his partner Sebastian drank their Merlot in their favourite London wine bar. David and Rachel went in a rural morning for their walk in the Teifi marshes, saw the radiance of the kingfisher, felt the wetlands’ wealth and depth.

 

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer whose work has been widely published in the USA. Burningword Literary Journal and three other magazines have nominated him for a Pushcart.

How to Touch the Dead

January 2025 | poetry

I’ve rehearsed this in my mind

countless times–

Put the broom or cardboard scrap

on far side of carcass

Place scoop– something thin and stiff

yet flexible, at near edge

Draw broom towards scoop–

towards myself

 

This is where the problem lies–

no matter what tool

I feel the soft roll of death-filled body

limp foot flop, rotation of tail

through glove, through broom and dustpan

into my veins, my whole being

I can’t do this

I fear my wrist might twitch the pan

popcorn creature into air

 

Once our cat left a field mouse

in the dining room midday

I ran through scenarios for hours

gathered gloves, small paper bag, old broom

but ended up hiding it beneath empty box

until my husband returned from work

to do the deed

 

Yet when he died

I took his lifeless hand directly into mine,

said goodbye, released

golden halo from finger, stayed

with him as he cooled

 

Joy Kreves

Joy Kreves is a visual artist/poet with an M.S. in Painting and a B.S. in art education from Illinois State University. She has often incorporated poems into or exhibited them alongside her artworks. Since 2021, she has been a DVP/US1 Poets member and is the current managing editor of the “US1 Worksheets” anthology. Her poems have appeared in several exhibition catalogs and “US1 Worksheets”. She has had poems published in NewVerseNews in 2024. In 2022, she had a poem at the Poetry show at Trenton Social. Kreves has hosted several “Artist Melts” events incorporating art and poetry at Suburban Frontier, her Ewing, NJ, art space.