January 2025 | poetry
Sun again:
that geode cold light
that briefly splits the granite sky:
storms there: storms there:
darker because of this
temporary brightness.
The first shadows in a week
like inkfade ancient tattoos
impermanent crease crosshatched
on the last of the blue wash snow.
And the red and cream lilies
you stem snapped two days ago
despite again March like thaw water
still pollen fill the living room
with the smell of blossoming
which for them is the smell
of fade dying:
but not yet:
but not today.
John Walser
John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize, and the Zone 3 Press Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart, and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.
January 2025 | poetry
If I count the times I cried today,
I would need more than two hands—
an 81 year old passes through security
and tells me her mother just stopped driving
yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter
hands me my coffee and says Here, baby;
and when we are lining up at the gate by letter
and number and I don’t know where to go,
a woman tells me conspiratorially that I should
just go behind her. Sometimes life feels conspiratorial.
Like we are conspiring to help each other despite the noise.
How can I explain why I am crying for the glassy-eyed
dog being carried in a tote? For the little boy being led
bleary-eyed to catch a plane I pray will land safely?
I don’t want to be a part of this world, but I can’t stop
negotiating with time, with flesh, audience to myself,
spectator to my own body. I couldn’t bear to be called
baby every day and poured a cup of something hot.
I think it would break me. I can’t bear to be be born
again into the kindness of each and every moment.
I want to believe we are not witless, just wingless,
trying to soar above the wreckage we have made.
That tears are never wasted. Is it foolish to pray
for something you know already exists?
For something that is everywhere?
Esther Sadoff
Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has three forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.
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.
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.
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.
January 2025 | poetry
it is human nature to want to build something
substantial and wonder why our bridges fall
like fever. upon conversion from spruce to roof,
the eastern hemlock remains square-shouldered
unhungry for sun. a hospital falls in the forest
and everyone can hear it, but you wouldn’t know.
the frame of my first home, a place to dream
walls onto bones; in the backyard: three pine trees
as surrogate mothers searching for their children
searching for their limbs. books of aftermath
on classroom shelves full of featureless figures
drumlined over rockets, ships, blimps, then me,
reluctant survivor stretching fingers across
the gray victims, too young to picture their faces
too safe to see the size of their crowd. learning
eventually every echo goes unanswered
somewhere in the world. the day we move i bury
the woody wedge of a pinecone beside the porch
since i believe everyone’s intent is to be good,
unaware mulch and soil boast different creators
unaware the sun can’t reach the seeds still at home
in their husk, unaware that no amount of protection
will ever grow into a stalwart tree that refuses
to abandon its spire and survive the winter alone.
Amanda Nicole Corbin
Amanda Nicole Corbin is an Ohio-based poet who has had her work published in The London Magazine, Door is a Jar, Pile Press, Gone Lawn, the Notre Dame Review, and more. Her debut full-length collection, addiction is a sweet dark room, (Another New Calligraphy, 2024) focuses largely on her journey and struggles with mental health and addiction. Find her on Threads and Instagram at @ancpoet or www.amandanicolecorbin.com.
