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Harris was a bare patch in the middle of bigger patch of prairie, but folks were proud of being respectable, hard-working Christians. Great-grandma Ellis grew up there, taught in a one-room schoolhouse back when the west had more territories than states. “We had a black doctor,” she told me once. “Real fine black doctor. ‘Course nobody went to him anymore once we got a white doctor.” I think of him now and then, a real fine black doctor, hurriedly packing up his wagon under the moonlight, a bleak dark figure swallowed whole by the bleaker, darker prairie.

4:00 a.m. again (3-21-22) and no sleep I tried forest sounds including a stream and an owl. I tried happy tv traveling, remodeling other animals in their habitat. I tried counting breaths and soft music. I tried acupressure and the mantra “be here now” I tried silence and the static was deafening Pills aren’t working. My reoccurring depression blossoms in a toxic reality. I tuned into WW3 thinking avoiding it was not working and that didn’t work either. Over 3 million refugees from Ukraine have run for their lives. My heart races for them as my body slowly disintegrates and the world as we know it explodes and burns. Annihilation a possibility. Night is too dark for sleep In 2020 Belinda began an online show called GAS: Poetry, Art & Music which features interviews, readings, performances and art show in a video format available free at http://youtube.com/BelindaSubraman An online journal by the same name is here: https://gaspoertyartandmusic.blogspot.com/

SIXTY-SEVEN STORKS Sixty-seven storks came before you were born, the cigognes of Aubonne. One nested on our roof. My name's 23, she said. She was huge, six feet or more from tail to beak, wing to wing. Her feathers were white that contained every colour. Her wing tips were ink black like the mother of all birds. She cocked her head to speak, a clash, crack and clattering of the long red swords - her beak. in a mix of machine gun and morse, she said she'd bring a boy in winter, now she didn't stay in Africa, but in the full landfills of Spain. The boy will have red plumage, with dots on a face of frost. Our own faces were touching, me stretched out the skylight with 23's bill poking in scouring for moles and voles. I’m not even peckish, she said, reading my mind, your lizards are to die for/ He'll be soft and so strong and not often wrong. She retreated her beak. a soft touch of wing on bill to say her goodbye – but stopped as coolly as she flies and said - oh, by the nests, later there will be a girl, dogged and half horse, half human. This time she did retreat – gracefully of course – but not before one last clonk: I'll carry them always over rising seas and wild forests to find heaven in the too-hot human hell. Notes: cigonne is French for stork. Aubonne is a village in western Switzerland. FOUND She allowed me to go, but I never arrived. I had fire in my belly, I went door to door, to every club in the city. And I found my heart spilled. On the night I was killed. I was found naked – in just a teddy boy coat – in the meeting house lane. They came in fours or fives, the blue girls, and stared and shrugged. On the morning I was found. Propped up, among the dock leaves lining the cobble stones, I watched them prod and photo me. Saw them look past me. On the morning, I was found. I’m shining in the sun. Before – I’d hide in the flat or, if she sent me out, I’d blink and squint, and girls would heckle at my shorts and freckles. In the summer, she prowled. “Party boy found dead” – “Nude and assaulted”. No one saw, no one spotted. Y-cut, waked, satin cushion, in my only suit in a pine coffin. Only magpies mourning. When I was fed, to the ground. MURDER OF CROWS Black-suited, black-hatted men, coat tails flapping, on all-black bikes – no helmets, gears, gear, lanes. Septuagenarians, they sweep along country roads like old crows. At dusk they silhouette the sky – riding, roding woodcocks. Now, as elastane peacocks preen, those cocks and crows are dodos. ENOUGH I am enough. I am as eyeless as a cave tetra. But I am enough. I sprout cactus glochidia. My arms are rail tracks of harm. I creep day to day through my one life. I am enough. I swallow eights pills a day. They pump volts through me. I flinch and squirm though an infinite sea of inflating universes. I am not enough.

On the Stones of the Temple Floors Incantations are Written There comes a time when most people start walking back, walking back to wherever it is they came from, trying to find the place where they were known. No one speaks of poetry or money or of left turns in front of trucks or the judgments of the courts or your second divorce, they speak of how shy you were when you were nine, or how the grade one teacher lived to be one-hundred and about the record-setting heat of the seventeenth of September and it is like walking towards the east and into the rising sun - just like walking into the old and empty cathedrals of Europe and being the first to arrive and it smells like a long time and the air tastes like many centuries but it is empty, no one is there, and pray for her, pray for her if you pray, and pray for me too, pray for me. Sweet love, these murmurs say, I have done no harm. My Next Ex-Girlfriend is Really Good Looking I told my parents, before I’d introduced her to them, that my next ex-girlfriend was really good-looking. Pre-Covid we’d sit on the deck and have a glass and she’d smoke Purple Kush and we’d look up and count meteors and satellites and the sisters in the Pleiades and look for anything interesting. When the International Space Sation goes over it’s quite a sight. Those days are gone. I miss the nights, not the person. I did not see any UFOs. She was a believer, but in and of itself that's nothing, I know tons of people who believe, like the guys that I work with, and the one doesn't even believe in wind chill. He does believe in ghosts. His wife says that one night he sat up in bed and talked steadily but incoherently for ten minutes and she couldn't wake him up. It scared her. Finally, he lay back down and she was able to wake him up. He told her he'd talked to his dead mother the whole time, he'd woken up and there she was. He had tears in eyes when his wife told me the story. My next ex-girlfriend is going to be really good looking, and it would be nice if she lived somewhere warm, but if there’s rough water on the coast of that tranquil place, we’ll be ok to spend the day alone and the light will last us like the light on midsummer’s eve, past the anger of that passing storm, and when I tell the story of that day, I’ll speak about speaking about ghosts. Go Ahead and Ask Me People ask what happened. I tell them she’s in the women’s prison, in Banning, California, or that she married a wealthy doctor. I say that she dresses well these days, and she’s active in Republican fund-raising circles. I tell them that she got back together with her high-school boyfriend, and that just last week she asked to borrow three-hundred dollars. She said it was for cocaine, for him. She’d pay me back when she could. I tell them that I have not seen her for years, but her son still calls me and he’s doing alright. He never speaks of her. I tell them that I saw she’d been promoted. She’s one rung below the C-Suite now. She seems to be doing well. I tell them I heard she’d found, and lost, Jesus, and I think she’s living with her mother again. I tell them that she’s driving truck. She’s quit drinking. She’s crafting candles from beeswax. She’s selling them online. She has at least three cats. She says she’s done with men. So, people ask me what happened, and I tell them I don’t know.

An aide told the press that his boss had rejected the idea of having His image added to Mount Rushmore because South Dakota was “a shithole state.” At a press conference, arranged for the following day, the aide had been compelled to kneel in front of the assembled reporters. He apologized to the good people of South Dakota and admitted that he had lied. The President Himself said that calling South Dakota a shithole state had been a joke and that He did not understand why some people had no sense of humor. Then He used the Presidential Saber to execute the aide, laughing when He failed to effect the beheading with a single stroke and then failing to remove the head with several more strokes because He was distracted by the need to watch the reporters to make sure they were laughing along with Him. In disgust, He finally threw the weapon down. He asked why His staff had failed to sharpen it. The Vice President knelt in front of Him. He apologized but asked the President to take notice of the fact that the treasonous aide was dead. The President assured the good people of South Dakota that once the Twin Towers had been finished He would indeed have His image added to Mount Rushmore. He planned to force California to pay for the work. At another press conference, a reporter asked if it was appropriate to speak of “Twin” Towers. After all, the one under construction in the nation’s capital, next to the Washington Monument, would be exactly twice the height of the latter. It would rise one thousand one hundred and ten feet into the sky. But the one being built in the city of the President’s birth would commemorate the year of His birth by rising one thousand nine hundred and forty-six feet. The President asked the reporter if her mother was still alive. Before she could answer He said He hoped she was so that she could ask who her father really was. He said He could see by the way she was dressed—or not dressed—that she had acquired her morals from her mother. The reporter acted as if the President’s remarks had not affected her. She shouted another question. The President had already turned to another reporter but He turned back to her because her question interested Him. She had asked why the restrooms designated for use by the press no longer contained toilet paper. The toilet paper had been replaced by stacks of copies of her own newspaper. The President said it was because her newspaper was not good for anything else. She said that she understood the sentiment though she disagreed. But she observed that even those members of the press who supported the President had to use her newspaper instead of toilet paper, and the kind of paper on which newspapers are printed is unsuited for the task. She said she preferred not to specify the shortcomings of that kind of paper but she believed the President would understand. The President told her she had made a good point. He thanked her. Then He spoke to the Vice President. He instructed the Vice President to call the CEO of the company that made Charmin. The CEO should be instructed to manufacture a toilet paper that felt as soft as Charmin and did the work just as effectively as Charmin, but that looked like the newspaper under discussion. The President returned His attention to the female reporter. He said He wanted to tell her one more thing about her clothes. He said that ordinarily He liked short skirts but that her legs were not good enough to justify wearing them. However, He said, He wished to commend her for the smoothness of the skin on her knees. He said her mother must have taught her about the benefits of knee pads. As for the completed Twin Towers, in every respect other than height they duplicated one another precisely. Each depicted the President in a toga. He had mandated a departure from traditional representations of toga-draped figures. The garment flowed loosely over His body everywhere except at the groin. There, the toga had been pulled tight in order to reveal a conspicuous bulge. The mouth opened wide. Admirers thought this was meant to indicate the President’s good humor. The statues showed Him laughing, they said: perhaps at unpatriotic Californians, perhaps at idiot reporters, perhaps at the latest illegal immigrant to whom He had given the bum’s rush across the border. The inaugurating ceremonies, both staged on the same day, demonstrated that the wide-open mouth was not only expressive but functional. In the morning at the Tower in the nation’s capital, a number of the President’s treasonous critics were placed inside the mouth. The head, unlike the rest of the statue, had not been made out of stone. It was made of steel, the better to facilitate the mechanical operation of the great jaw, which crushed the traitors to death. In the afternoon at the Tower in the city of the President’s birth, the remains of the traitors were placed inside the mouth and burned to cinders. The President explained that they had deserved to be executed twice because they had not merely committed treason against Him. By doing so, they had also blasphemed. Don Stoll's fiction is forthcoming in A New Ulster and has appeared recently in Punk Noir (tinyurl.com/3ut3m7e7), Terror House (tinyurl.com/4tch459c),and A Thin Slice of Anxiety (tinyurl.com/fy9wer4h). In 2008, Don and his wife founded their nonprofit (karimufoundation.org) which continues to bring new schools, clean water, and medical clinics to a cluster of remote Tanzanian villages.

Resting Heart Rate The hollow heart pumps peace rhythmically, contracting and dilating, pushing calm methodically against the flow of fight. Peace is the absence of disturbance but it is not passive. Being the heart that pumps peace against the current of rage is as difficult as trying to hold up the sky, to keep it from falling down around us. We are weakened by our fear that someday it will - the sky- fall down. It keeps trying. To crash down on us. We know it on days when it is thick with layers upon layers of deep dark clouds in 3D glory that erupt into 4D with rain and sleet and hail beating down on us. That is the hardest sky to hold off, our arms tired, and we are soaked through but still we hold it all at bay because though it will drench us to our core for a while until we think we can’t take anymore, it will stop eventually and the clouds will clear and there will be a sky that is easier to hold again. Easier to live under. There are days that the sky fools us into thinking that it doesn’t need to be held off at all, like it can just be. Like we can just be. Days when it is just a painting of a specific shade of blue an artist spent hours of trial and error to get just right and it has a sun in it - sometimes bare, radiant, exposed and sometimes hiding demure behind white wisps of brand new cotton balls. We let our arms down then, to relax at our sides those days but we keep our eyes on it always - the sky - to see what it will do next while our hearts keep pumping out peace, hoping that peace will echo off the heavens all over the earth. The Northeast Direct I board a train in Hartford the Northeast Direct to Philly find a boy playing banjo serenading from the back row long plaited hair, kind eyes, and a golden voice I figure he’s there just for me not having been on many trains I can’t be sure but I don’t think train car concerts happen everyday I don’t feel the train start only know when it’s moving I know this song and I wonder if we’ve met in the midwest yet I want to talk but the song doesn’t stop eyes that won’t leave mine alone tell me words get in the way and his smile says it all before it ends, another song begins I could stay all day on the Northeast Direct And listen to where this goes but I’m not that girl who drops everything to stay on a train I wish I was carefree enough but something waits for me a plan with a job and a suit this may be the right song but it’s the wrong tune I can’t follow him but he could follow me he only keeps singing I drift off at my stop looking back as the Northeast Direct rolls on so do I Walking Around walking around in the night in the cold in the dark walking around again not with me this time but not alone either i saw it coming i knew it was only a matter of time before i was replaced what was mine is hers what i was to you she is now and yes it hurts because you don’t really care anymore go ahead and walk her around and drop her cold it isn’t my heart anymore It Could Be a Love Story Once you’ve had the sort of passion that is alarming it’s hard to get there again and you find you spend more energy trying to love than actually loving trying to imagine what it could be instead of seeing what it is If you put what you want the most inside what you have it could be a love story When love is what you want you can take what you have watch it endure call it love and live in its illusion Squint and spin it watch what you want and what you have swirl and blur and blend As minutes turn to hours hours to days days to weeks weeks to years year after year you will be what they call happy or you won’t know any better anymore Beth Mulcahy is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared in various journals. Her writing bridges gaps between generations and self, hurt and healing.Beth lives in Ohio with her husband and two children and works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. Her latest publications can be found here:https://linktr.ee/mulcahea.

Fledgling The way you smell brings me back To the feel of your smile against my hair, The sound of breath on my cheek. The feel of your fingers against my back, Like a bird, a fledgling, Learning to flap its wings against the wind. Your callow hand spreads to embrace mine, So young and naïve, and full of intent. I’ve never been held by anyone The way you are holding me with your eyes. But nocturnal desire fades with the light, And with the dawn, I am a diurnal creature Who needs much more than you. Your emotions slide From your fingertips to mine. My love weighs more than yours, Drags us out of the sky into a depth of oceans, Where your eyes dry out with salts. I tear out my heart in recompense, Hold it above waves undulating in sunlight, While you dive away, unaccepting. Voice-over Mine The hooded perfume of a voice-over just like how you talk me down from the heights of hysteria breath with mint melted on your tongue. I know you don’t know me like you used to know the taste of something more than love, when you took these thoughts of mine changed them rearranged them. I know you will never smell the way you once did, the way you once closed your eyes and could only see my language. Not the words how you follow them now, wanting them to be other than the truth, wanting them not to take me home. When we speak, I cannot talk you down from my heights of hysteria, I cannot drop you down and take that taste of mint from your tongue Your voice over mine I shout, am not heard. Drift At 15, I wrote poems on trig homework and declared 35 too old to have a child. My best friend fell in love and it was requited. I could not quell my envy and certainty That every boy would eventually break my heart. At 42, I write poetry on the back of meeting agendas, and wonder if 43 is too old to have a second child. I fell in love and it was requited. But I cannot quell the envy and certainty Of our 4-year-old only child who is sure he needs a sister. I try to squelch the truth I’ve known all these years, That this man I love will someday break my heart, Or I will break his, At the end of this life that will never be long enough. I weigh this knowledge against the weight of an arm Around me every night as I drift into sleep, Anchoring me in place. Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian and an award-winning journalist. Her creative work has been published by Rigorous Magazine, Discretionary Love, Pile Press, Variant Lit, Twin Pies Literary,Roi Fainéant Press andChapter House Journal. It is forthcoming in Void Space Zine and Moss Puppy Magazine. She has read pieces in the Flash Fiction Forum and Quiet Lightning reading series.

Once upon a time in a village by the river, lived Suku and Dukhu, sister and brother. Suku and Dukhu wasn’t their real name. It was their father’s loving call, which they grumbled was lame. She played ludo in the tree and dipped in the pool, little Suku wore her brother’s shirt to school. Mother packed them fish-rice and a pickle of lime, and sent the kids off with a bottle and a dime. Seasons came, seasons were gone, and many a trendy dress she wore. But grown up Suku could love none the way her brother’s baggy shirt she’d adore. She did well, went to the fashion college in town. But oft she wondered how to make a pretty gown. She went on tweaking until the day it dawned— the key was the village by the river that held her memories fond. My childhood memories I’ll weave on my gown! Suku lit up as a smile soothed her frown. Loose baggy silhouettes she made, cut in her notebook’s geometric shape. She styled her dresses with badges and ties, drawing from her childhood as she wondered how time flies. Checks and stripes she borrowed from her brother, thought long and deep to match one with the other. Here and there she put some ruffles, to keep it together she made fabric buckles. She coloured her dresses in memories of yore, going back in time as they flashed and wore. Some came off vague, some were fresh, hence the black and white, and ludo colours in her dress. She styled her dresses, tried with a pony and a bun, until it was fit for any woman. And thus with much work and fun, Suku stitched her Spring Summer Collection. About the poem - I wrote this piece as a fun experiment while watching my fashion designer wife fret for weeks on end over her college design project (we were dating at that time). I took it upon myself to calm her and we travelled places and met artisans and craftsmen looking for inspiration until she found her project idea in her childhood. I have deliberately used a childish voice and amateur rhyme as an homage to every creative person out there who has managed to keep the child in them alive. Hold on. Did I tell you that she went on to win the Best Design Collection that year! She actually read this poem to the jury when asked to explain her project which also has the same title. Ankit Raj is an assistant professor, rock vocalist and former software engineer from Chapra, Bihar, India. He teaches English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal and is a PhD candidate at IIT Roorkee. He has poetry and short fiction published/forthcoming in Roi Fainéant Press, The Bitchin' Kitsch, The Broadkill Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Streetcake Magazine and The Dillydoun Review among other venues. Ankit's articles have appeared in Routledge and Johns Hopkins University Press journals. He tweets @ankit_raj01

It’s best to pick an object or an animal or a place and its weather; no one will understand you otherwise, if ever. I chose an ocean. It was strange not to be afraid to ride in a car on the surface of the ocean, to build a fire at night of road-spent tires, splayed and glowing in the middle of the ocean. Such power we had over danger under the bright she-bear Ursa Major! Of course, I know what you mean. How is it we took pleasure from the formidable, from the less-than-zero nether-lean of Fremont County February? How is it we should measure the many trucks and cars and fires like ours on an ocean? So solidly deep the reach of flaming bars, the shimmering embers from the milky highway of fishermen above to hungry pike beneath drawn to danger by our many shiny objects dandling through holes we sawed in the ocean. * Ocean Lake is located in Fremont County, Wyoming, 6,100 acres surface size. Mary Kathryn Lowell was born in Western Kentucky but reared in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming where words became her correspondence with the world of mountains and rivers. She has written poetry all her life. Her career as a poet is less known, if at all, than her articles on icon painting in journals such as the Orthodox Arts Journal, and Another City where she is a contributing author.

Part of my training was to learn how to smile as my mind secretly plotted your undoing, to agree and nod and make nice and keep quiet then light a candle and poison the well. I may not sew but I can visualize a voodoo doll. Admittedly, I haven't done that for a spell. But inside, I've sunken more sailors than a manatee; and blinded more eyeballs than a welder's sparks; Of course I'm just mumbling nonsense, sotto voce as the saying goes. I self-implode like Narcissus: to myself, for myself, by myself, self-important, self-amused. My powers are limited, not super. I'm neither a prophet nor a master strategist. Can I do harm? Everyone can. It's so easy. I try to default to Love but some days it's hard. A literary grantee of Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators, Drew Pisarra is the author of "You're Pretty Gay" (2021), a collection of short stories, "Infinity Standing Up" (2019), a collection of sonnets, and "The Strange Case of Nick M." (2021), a radio play commissioned by Imago Theatre.

spare. We paint her old house creating constellations of black holes in dormant spaces where things collected dust once A shade of lilac akin to that skin we wear masking walls layered with seventy years of history I’m assigned the little bedroom barely used bar dirty washing a dampened box lies like a dead fly still half twitching with life I hold a Geisha statue awhile freshly plucked from the treasure trove thinking of the places she’d never been but pretended to go all the same i like the way the cat feels on my back, paws dipping away deep into spine, claws sometimes nipping, catching skin. I’ve laid here six hours. The light outside has crept away from the window, burrowed itself in the moonlight’s hammock. The pigeons have risen and gone to bed again as I’ve stared at the ceiling’s crevices, rolling over from one end to another. Not hearing my voice all day for any moment, only speaking to thoughts that cloud the head. I think she wants to be fed. on that. Everywhere I look it’s there. Through sleepy eyed streets Midnight doorways caked in whispers In frosted over windows In darkened dead fingers Hanging from dying trunks In mirrors cracked with awful luck Down sinks sunk with daydreams and it laughs // howls // sniggers deep from a belly big with orange and purple air it sucked away from the horizon, snatched from our closing hours the walks home, the stroked head, the hands held, the word never said Cus we’ll never even get close To what it means What it is Why we crave it Or what it could be And maybe that’s enough Maybe that’s all it has to be Don’t go easy on me this poem won’t end with a rhyme But it’ll talk about how you might Sell my pieces in a market of mirrors Brand my ankles with dark prices Bid on these bones In dingy internet corners Rock me out to sea Clobber my brain with a settee Mush, London’s comfiest smoothie Don’t let me rest I’ll never sit down And this poem won’t end with a rhyme. Each day I’ll pick out a smile to wear Saturate my cheeks in it, Apple bob every muscle, joint, fibre in it Rub it round Moisturise Drown In and amongst the saddest glee You or I ever did see Just don’t let this poem end with a rhyme. Georgie Bailey is a multi-award-winning Playwright and Poet, originally from Bordon, Hampshire. He recently completed an attachment to the Oxford Playhouse and studied at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s MA Dramatic Writing. His works have been published in a various collections such as Ropes Literary Journal, The Lake, Horizon Magazine and Trouvaille Review.

I spent $100 on pizza and gas today. It was nice pizza and regular gas. I don’t really have $100 to spend in this way because I owe a lot of people money. They’re not regular people though, they’re corporations. I owe them so much because I bought nice things from them — things nicer than the pizza, like my car or an education. Arguably the car is not actually nicer than the pizza, although it can do more things. You cannot drive a pizza to work. The pizza needs no gas, though, and leaves me in only a little more debt, to a credit card company that just upped my limit. Now I can owe them more for gas, for fancy pizza, but not for the education, which I cannot charge. Some people (almost certainly not the people reading this, but definitely some people — they are out there, making decisions) might argue that I should not get the nice pizza while I am in the unclean state of owing money to all these entities. It is those people who I’d like to remind that Snorkmaiden, daydreamer though she be, can (according to Moomin.com) “be very resourceful when she's in a tight spot.” If it comes to it—and I hope that it won’t—I will sell my gold anklet.