April 2024 | poetry
The boy loves lying
in this open field, blinking
at the bowl of summer sky.
Heedless of wiregrass itching his neck, of ants
sizing up his ears,
he tracks the somber wings that float
and swoop in primordial arcs
as though suspended
from puppeteer’s strings. Still
as a graveyard angel
the boy believes he can draw them near.
The pitch-black hunters
wheel through the midday glare,
shadows skimming the ground
crossing the boy’s pale legs.
He can almost feel the first one
thump onto his chest,
feel the talons’ fish-hook grip,
smell the stench of outstretched wings,
poised as in a dream,
above this small emptiness
in the shape of a boy.
Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that require getting through to people who may not be listening. When he finally got around to writing poetry, his work appeared in literary magazines like Dunes Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Rockvale Review, and Third Wednesday Journal. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Fran.
Ken Hines
April 2024 | poetry
The first time you get
the wind knocked out of you,
you will be astonished
by what seems a fatal wallop—
one moment running,
the next, bulge-eyed and gaping
like a carp tossed in a rowboat.
No one prepares us.
We face this first shock
as innocents, unwarned
of the breathtaking thwack,
unassured of its passing.
Having lost what was thought
a basic given, it’s only natural
to reconsider the dependable,
and adopt, perhaps,
a more cautious posture,
for who could frolic
in their stocking feet or leap
with quite the same abandon,
once they know
how slick the footing,
how sudden and cruel the blow?
Angie Hexum is a speech-language pathologist by trade. A Nebraska native, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduating from Swarthmore College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Caesura and Gyroscope Review. She currently resides in Campbell, CA where she enjoys hiking, cycling, and singing in a chorus.
Angie Hexum
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 | 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
April 2024 | poetry
To go back is as hard almost
as forward.
We all got a little silence lodged
in our molars some time
in middle school, mostly.
Field trips to the museum of future affairs,
long bus rides, behind the glass
our taxidermied bodies
in frozen poses of parenting,
pharmacy lines, conference rooms.
On the ride back we did not discuss it and also
there was no ride back.
We lived there in the museum, locked in,
setting fires in the courtyard to keep busy.
No one came for us
and we liked it that way.
Wrapped our fists in the curtains,
broke the glass,
hauled out our own effigies.
Only warmed them by the fire.
To go forward is much
harder than backward but also less impossible.
They came for us, pounded on the doors,
begged and begged.
We would not budge. Not locked in
but them locked out.
The smoke they thought
was signal was just s’mores.
In the basement canned food
for any number of eternities.
Draped our arms around
ourselves and sang songs
we didn’t know yet.
The silence dried up,
our teeth gleamed, a new silence
came to cushion us.
It was different, springier,
a shared give in the air.
Oh, sure, there must be lots we’re missing,
but we’d just be missing more
out there. We’ve seen enough.
No season left to tempt us.
Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent poetry has appeared in Red Rock Review, Prime Number Magazine, and The Westchester Review. Her work has been nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize and awarded the 2020 Penn Review Fiction Prize. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com.
Katherine Tunning
