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At the hardwood flooring outlet, the sales rep is an older gentleman (although should we always assume gentleman just because of the older that precedes him?), and because I'm a woman, when I select my hardwood planks, Al hands me the flyer. The flyer itself is quite a thing, a "what year is this?" pause in my shopping excursion, the parentheses hanging in the air incredulously over my head. The flyer’s header screams “What puts greater force on a resilient floor?!” in bold, forty-point typeface, and a multiple-choice graphic selection sits below: The outline of what is labeled a “two-ton car,” the likeness of which I’d guess is a Lincoln Town Car. The dark silhouette of an African elephant, tusks prominently displayed. The third choice is clearly the most offensive to good ol’ Al: the frame of a woman, her face a featureless rounded oval, her body cloaked in what appears to be a trench and a wide-brimmed hat. She is carrying an oversized briefcase in her left hand, feet clad in offensive pointy-heeled shoes. “Stilettos are back in vogue,” the flyer continues, “but women should be warned.” I know the woman offends Al by the way he grips his blue ballpoint pen, the tip chewed into plastic splintery edges, and circles her right shoe just above the caption that reads: “a 125 lb woman.” And I know she offends him by the ensuing lecture that is bestowed upon us by Al, our gentleman flooring rep. Rather, I should say he bestows it upon me because he never glances in my husband's direction. He tells me of the dangers of the stiletto, the most offensive of footwear, the clomping and stomping of which women pound the oak or walnut or teak, manly briefcase in hand and intimidating hat protruding. How dare she walk in such a way, with hard, confident footsteps and a face with no eyes, nose, or smile. I think of how Al commented when I entered His Store that I should be smiling, what a fun day picking out flooring for the missus! Was my husband smiling? I wondered, but didn’t say, choosing instead to smile, the submissive response a woman learns. Of course I oblige, with my upturned lips; a woman should be smiling as she selects the floorboards upon which she will cook, and clean, and birth babes. I imagine the phone calls: Al perched at his desk, surrounded by samples in rich browns and mahoganies and the occasional gray, bobbing his head as he says "yes ma'am" to the panicked woman on the line, gesturing with a finger to a nearby customer that he’ll just be a moment longer, phone cradled between his shoulder and chin, the woman’s shrill cries piercing his ear drum like a stiletto. “I’ve advised you of the dangers,” he would have continued, as if discussing the consequences of climbing a rock wall without a harness, of skydiving without a tandem partner, of chasing a tornado in a beat-up Chevy. He would remind her that she’d signed the Stiletto Waiver, her name scrawled above the dotted line, as mine would soon be. And I wondered, are the husbands required to sign, to confirm they have discussed it with their wives? Yes I am a stay-at-home mom now, probably look like a stay-at-home mom now, all LuluLemon leggings and messy bun and husband at my side. But once I was what Al might call a "career woman"; the rare bird of a female corporate executive, whose shoes scratch and dent and leave tiny, angry impressions in Al's precious, pristine planks of pine, the weight of her arrogance pressed into heels. Yes, my husband is the earner of the oatmeal raisin bread loaves now, I’m just here to pick out the pretty flooring. But I want to tell Al that if it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for the decades of my labor, we wouldn't be in the position to select these planks of my choosing; that if I hadn’t stomped my way up that invisible ladder one sturdy rung at a time, we’d be going with laminate. But all I say to Al as I sign his waiver with a smile is, “I don’t wear stilettos.” Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. She delights in traveling, boating on the Chesapeake Bay, and hiking with her toddler. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Coffee + Crumbs, The Phare, Sledgehammer, Capsule Stories, Versification, The South Florida Poetry Journal, Cauldron Anthology, The Elpis Pages, For Women Who Roar, Remington Review, and The Hallowzine. Annie is working on a memoir about mother/daughter relationships; you can find her writing on Instagram @anniemarhefka, Twitter @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.

For the love of Physics Oh my little vector, how I follow thee -hither to thither- thou art better than any scalar. Your resistance decreases my current initially, but my momentum carries me through to my maximum EMF. You accelerate my velocity, charge my capacitance, Oh, my solenoid you incline my potential energy. You intensify my electric field summarise Coulomb’s law. Better than the apple are you for this Newton No longer am I inert- I accelerate towards your force and try to exert an equal but opposite love upon you The death of the dragonfly Chasing its fluttering little clear wings, we never realise when it leads us from the grassy lakeshore to the dark cave lands. So mesmerized by its disproportionate body- so very illogical the image could have been captured from a child's imagination, we follow it. It appears to be so unattainable so shiny- so bright- but, when captured in a glass bottle it looks like any other common flying insect. Disheartened by its mediocrity, we release the prisoner of flight back into the merciless air, only to mindlessly search for happiness by trying to capture the seemingly shiny dragonfly once Gold and Silver I can be your silver: -showy, gaudy, ostentatious, gleaming, glistening, sparkling- for all to notice. You can be my gold: - solid, strong, and sturdy uncompromising, incorruptible, classy- for all to envy. Flaunt me around your finger as we dance toward the silver gleaming moonlit path. Me grasping onto your golden shoulder anticipating the golden sun of morrow. Let us be entangled – confused as to where your light ends and my darkness begins. Forevermorelet me be your understated silver and you, you can be my timeless gold. Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to express her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures. Sometimes, she dabbles in photography, painting, and baking lopsided layered cakes. Her writing has been featured(on/forthcoming) in Brittle Paper, Daily Drunk Magazine, Door is a jar, Luna Luna Mag and Versification, amongst others. She is the Pushcart nominated author of Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) She rambles annoyingly at Twitter: @ShikshaWrites. You can find (or ignore her) at https://shikshadheda.wixsite.com/writing/poetry

I Loved You Differently but I Loved You the Most Remember that summer workshop when I alone defended the whole of your second draft? My zeal even made you, its creator, wide-eyed and frozen in your seat. You knew I was the quiet one among our peers and always abided by the path of least resistance. But my gut feeling said that you were going for the music of the alliterations since you’ve long shied away from the antique charm of end rhymes. (Note: By “antique,” I mean, “immemorial and immortal” -- and why not write in that scheme again?) You knew that one word less and the poem would be off-key and could no longer sing. For you, my impassioned feedback: “Let us not go for concise until it is no longer nice.” (If ours was a barbershop, every customer would be leaving as a skinhead!) Remember that summer? Anyway, you don’t have to. By the way, I still . . . Never mind. My Buyer’s Hesitation over Gifting You a Bike After three attempts at taking your own life, with the last one almost final, you asked me to buy you a bike. A bike! I could only imagine the happiness it would give you! To ride around the park in lieu of walking around the ward! Yes! A bike! But . . . how fast can any driver of a speeding car react in case you attempt to test the strength of your two-wheeled vehicle against his four-wheeled metal? A bike. Yes, I know the joy of riding one. I can already see the unbearable beauty of you gliding by; your bronze hair billowing to the passing breeze, your smile ethereal as the afternoon sun. But . . . Karlo Sevilla of Quezon City, Philippines is the author of the poetry collections “Metro Manila Mammal” (Soma Publishing, 2018) and “Outsourced! . . .” (Revolt Magazine, 2021). Shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021 and thrice nominated for the Best of the Net, his poems appear in Philippines Graphic, DIAGRAM, Small Orange, Radius, Matter, Eclectica, Better Than Starbucks, and elsewhere.

Fishing the Dawn Day again breaks grey, briny mist rising from the wild sea. Into the froth a quartet wades, clad only in thin briefs, muscles thick, firm, flexing beneath sun-browned skin. Leaping over wave heaving wave fractured by their thunder, these men toss hand-lines, pull out silvery fish. The young son of one guards shorts, shirts spread upon a grassy slope. Among palm fronds birdsong begins to punctuate this drying morn & the sun is seeping through thinned clouds. Nighttide, Santa Marta Bay The moon waxes behind fractured clouds A breeze blows from snowy mountains In the clear waters people bob with each flow Each ebb of this sea shushes against the beige-grey sand The shouts of children slice the night Rhythm of drums float upon this noche On a rock island at the mouth of this bay A faro flashes & further out are the lights of boats Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 300 journals on six continents; and 19 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Escape to the Sea (Origami Poems Project, 2021). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. Her writing has been honored by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2011) and nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at: www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer or https://latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.

Awoke at 12:12 on the 12/12/21 and thought about words and how dogs laugh where we can see it and cats where we do not. The way ice cream will never deliquesce completely though it tries. Look, there's the sword of truth lying on the ground in a vacant lot underneath a broken "For Rent" sign. So, come on, we said, name that fig. It's yours. And then they invented zero. Kyla Houbolt (she, her), born and raised in North Carolina, currently occupies Catawba territory in Gastonia, NC. Her first two chapbooks, Dawn's Fool and Tuned were published in 2020. More about them on her website, https://www.kylahoubolt.com/. Her individually published pieces online can be found on her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/luaz_poet. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet.

I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me every night too much birthday in the big city the craziest year of my life & Kendall Roy that deeply broken soul, has been with me every step of the way, like a guardian angel with more money than I’ll ever need but with the same taste in music, all bangers all the time, here it comes the white lines here it comes the radios replacing our mouths so every word coming out is disingenuous rhythm something thought up by someone else yet we still shake our hips through boardrooms or treehouses always acting like young dinosaurs having their first roars pathetic little fucking narcissists who started this big war against the world, but more so against ourselves now watch us fall apart, here it comes the hangings of Babylon, here it comes the family rubble in our eyes so every time we try to form a memory of tenderness the flowers don’t feel quite right but wouldn’t it be nice? building a treehouse above your grave where I scribble swallowed blood, all of the depraved mistreatments I will always crave because you needed something small to be a sacrifice to seem a deity I need to be the last of us alive undulating in a dying tree inside your architecture, I survive I blossom here if indecently the walls are papered velvet cashmere sheets I wrap around the men who climb to me up rungs I hung the afternoon I grieve an idea of you I refuse to save no room inside a treehouse above a grave here it comes the white lines here it comes the family rubble in our eyes Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Instagram: the.man.about.town) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). He is also the editor of Ghost City Review. Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of many books of poetry including Crow Carriage (Sweet Tooth Story Books) and The Stakes (Really Serious Literature) and the editor of seven anthologies. She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com

Two Shades of Green Hopeful soul stands alone, calling to fate with come-hither eyes. Self-abandons at opening credits, never reviews the synopsis. Soft, unblemished, translucent skin longs to touch what lurks in shade. Babe in the woods sings gospel to wolves, no hustle, no endgame, no chance. Safety junkie exterminates all problematic desire cells. Gaze beyond reach, wise beyond treasure. Handcuffed, but not for kicks. Most inert by morning's light, alivest in sinuous, cryptic dreams. Cursing a world that never slows for an egg that declines to hatch. My Favourite Number Two is my preference. Shared, yet screamingly private, potential conspiracy. While perhaps I could manage one more, things bend under the weight. I was one of a trio of teenage boys. I told the others who I loved and it spread throughout the school, both able to point the finger. Two has its drawbacks - when I was bullied, I hated its guts - but when we decided to change the world and when I dared to kiss your lips, no other number came close. Lawrence Moore has been writing poems - some silly, some serious - since childhood. He lives in Portsmouth, England with his husband Matt and nine mostly well behaved cats. He has poetry published at, among others, Dreich, Pink Plastic House, Fevers of the Mind, Sarasvati and The Madrigal.

It was a toffee door, open for everyone, closed after midnight. There was family and dogs on the staircase; coffee-drop lozenges going up and down and round and round; the hum and sex of beautiful boys, talking, happy coffee in corners, laughter staring up at blueberry slush puppy skies, asking if it would rain on freckles and noses in that summer when we were as happy as fruit. Who would have known that it would end like it did, in leaves falling jagged on despair and gritty ice cream clouds the day after, sirens shrieking down the brown-orange carpet towards us? The party had been of mutual decision. No one remembers whose lips had said, “See you at ten-thirty at the solid house on the lake.” Picture us together, on blankets of swimming, picnics of cool water, drying off and sandwiches, heat spilling unexpectedly from the sun. Help us to go back and put the pieces together in our vacuum of petal happiness to the point where it all went wrong. Glasses raised to a life too easy and a xylophone of good sounds; all of us safe in our breezy cotton lightness. Life had taught us to be sure-footed, but that day Jody died and we need to know how unsteady moments got in and drowned her. She was the youngest in our blundering herd and we should have protected her. Julia writes small things which often have no beginning or end. This is no exception.

A Bible brond woman blows out unruly brunette hair, darkens your virgin eyelashes, light lengths, “who knew those were there.” Unholy ceremonial maquillage, the masses must be mesmerized in far away seats Doe eyes under theatrical lights must adore a borrowed infant, discretely cheat out towards the house where you are discussed, deified an hour with an object of lust two years older than you, “Joseph,” 16, whose surfer tan fingers grazing your bust, caressing faux Jesus, not his most obscene dalliance in a crowded chapel tonight. His latest conquest watches on from stage right. Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of many books of poetry including Crow Carriage (Sweet Tooth Story Books) and The Stakes (Really Serious Literature) and the editor of seven anthologies. She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com

Back when I used to tell my famous bed story, I told it slowly. In my mind, its events needed to undulate like a flag filmed in slow motion on a windy morning in an old TV commercial for a losing presidential candidate. But from the first time I told my famous bed story, I sensed that no matter how carefully I orchestrated my story’s details, my listeners weren’t entirely satisfied. Where I expected head shakes, grins, and guffaws at the story’s lively absurdity, where I expected head shakes of comradeship with all I had endured, I saw a blankness, perhaps even hostility, I couldn’t quite interpret. My famous bed story begins with my wife, B., telling me that I take up too much space in our bed. I expect the absurdity of this opening to be readily apparent to all who hear the story. I am a small person, so lacking in physical presence that I hesitate even to think of myself as a person. I rush to assure my listeners that throughout the course of the bed story, I will be entirely objective in my description of our relative physical space. I tell my listeners about my attention to the width of our bed. I describe my pains to measure the percentage of that width I occupy and ensure it is less than half of the total width. I recount my attention to my legs, lest they stray past that boundary; perhaps my knees, when I lie on my side facing B. and bend my legs, extend past their allotted space. In the story, I recount how each night, before I go to sleep, I remind myself to be very careful during the night to maintain my position, I tell how sometimes I wake up in the night and check to see that my body has not strayed past the center of the bed. A detail I am particularly proud of in my bed story, one I always expect to elicit gasps of glee, is my study every morning of the indentations on the mattress and the patterns of wrinkles on our sheets, both of which indicate that I am keeping to my side of the bed. Nonetheless, most mornings B. tells me that the night before I was bothering her, that I was in her space. In a burst of unexpected camaraderie, B. and I attack the problem together: We buy a wider bed. The first morning after the first night in the new, wider bed, B. tells me that I take up too much space in our wider bed, too. This is one of the story’s several intended punch lines, but the audience reaction never amounts to much. I suspect I could refine the wording, weight the sentence more toward the final couple of words. However, I have more confidence in the next part of the story, in which I describe my increasingly desperate efforts to reduce my presence in the bed, positioning myself further and further toward the edge until I am barely not falling off, my knees and elbows actually hanging over the side, like Wile E. Coyote after he has unknowingly dashed off a cliff’s edge and hangs there before plummeting to the canyon’s bottom. I really like this image, and once in a while, I do see someone in my audience crack a smile, although it’s possible the smile is merely a response to how hard I am selling this part of the story. At this point, I usually become aware that my famous bed story has no end. Sometimes I just finish with the Wile E. Coyote part. Sometimes I improvise a closing reminder of the absurdity of the original claim of my bed-hogging, just something to signal that the story is over. But no matter what, my listeners just stare at me, and I am left with the task of shifting our conversation to a new and less perplexing topic. When I sat down to write this piece I had a hazy ending in mind. Something like this: I would realize that what my audience found so confounding was the passiveness and compliance of my response, the absurdity that I did not finally make some bold statement asserting my right to half the bed. What I did not consider, however, was another possible ending: just how loathsome B. found it to share a bed with me, and with that revelation, the understanding of just how much of a failure my famous bed story, and I as its teller, has always been and will always be. Robert Fromberg is author of How to Walk with Steve (Latah Books), a memoir of autism, art, death, and embarrassment. His other prose has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hobart, Indiana Review, and many other journals. On Twitter, he is @robfromberg.

porchlight-lit lovers, they spoon tabby over white— dream their own warm home. let the sun burn out, freeze black, so as not to interrupt. Jack Apollo Hartley (@jackpollyharts) is a trans bi poet who wrote this with a teeny little tear in his eye because oh my god, those poor cats, oh no, jeez, and it's about to be winter, too.

The howling winter wind rattled the brittle window frames of the attic apartment so loudly in their withered sills that it caused Vernelle to jolt awake from her coma-like slumber. Sitting up with an already thick hangover, she gazed toward the foot of the futon, her mind slowly thawing as she watched the tortoiseshell-colored kittens begin to stir. She threw off the heavy blankets, stood, and staggered to her pea-green recliner, over the back of which last night’s jeans held a pack of cigarettes. “I’ve got to stop, '' she said between her pressed lips, striking a match. The trail of cigarette and sulfur smoke followed her from the bedroom into the cramped, awkwardly constructed living room where, after sidestepping her chaise lounge, she flicked the lock and opened the fire escape window. Immediately, the freezing air bit at her bare legs, causing her muscles to tense instinctively while goosebumps shot across her skin. “Sheezus” she said with a clenched jaw, resenting the winter season itself. She wanted to have a conversation with it. Reason with it. Lately, it seemed that the sky had decided to be permanently grey. In the deep winter months, it was rare to be able to tell what time it was with any real sense of accuracy. Not that Vern cared to keep time with a clock anyhow, preferring the tender paw of a kitten, a rattle of a window, or her own natural inclination to wake her up in the morning. Bracing herself against the draft of cold air, she took another hit. Aoife, the kitten who, it seemed so far, would be responding audibly to almost everything, announced himself in the bedroom. Then, he announced that he was headed into the middle room, and finally that he had arrived at the door frame that separated the two rooms. The typically spry and mischievous kitten raised his tiny pink nose into the stream of cold air pouring in, meowing with an inquisitive inflection. “Why yes, Aoife. It is colder than a witch’s tit!” she said, exhaling smoke through her nose, watching as her vocal pet jumped onto the chaise. As Aoife meowed affirmatively, his expression quickly shifted from lazy to laser focus while his ears turned around and back. Vern’s foggy mind cleared for a moment, quickly realizing that, by smelling the fresh air, Aoife had determined to be part of that frozen world outside. After lowering himself into a hunting stance at the foot of the chaise, he prepared to leap. “Oh, no you don’t,” she said affectionately while stepping forward to scoop the kitten up. But her blurry mind, not accounting for the sharp edge of the dormer, led her to smack her forehead so smartingly that she reeled back and off-balance. Through tunnel vision and stars, she saw that she was knocked to the ground, lying on her back between the chair and the window. “Wait!” she heard herself say, watching Aoife, unfazed and determined, leap from the chaise to the windowsill. She sat up dizzy while he quickly ascended the rail and hopped up to the gutter of the roof, missing with his back legs. Vern gasped in horror, leaning out to catch him if he fell. After a brief scrambling, he had disappeared. The faint smell of burning carpet crept into her nose, causing panic greater than her pain. She ran to the kitchen, found and poured a dirty mug full of water. Dashing to douse the quarter-sized ember that her cigarette had made on the rug, she noticed that Zenna, the quiet observer, had entered the room and was sitting calmly, grooming herself while she worked. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked. Zenna raised her chin inquisitively to observe the frazzled human, then returned to licking her paw, passing it over and between her ears. Stepping out onto the iron plateau, the winter air freezing her lungs, she clenched her chattering jaw and steadied herself. Past the gutter, halfway up to the ridge, she saw that Aoife was trying and failing to negotiate the icy asphalt shingles— clinging where he could find a grip. Vern yelled out to Aoife, who heard her plea through the harsh wind but responded in a defiant, determined tone. As Vern stood helpless, watching while her kitten gripped and slipped, a strong wind pushed him upside down, popping what little grip his front claws had. Tumbling in cartwheels, he howled out helplessly until finally landing with a plunk into the gutter. “Gotcha!” She said as she grabbed the scruff of his neck. Carefully, Vern sidled half-naked, frozen, battered and hungover back into the stale smoke-filled room with a fist full of kitty, dropping it onto the center of the living room floor. After securing the latch, she stood for a moment, looking over the roof of her next-door neighbor to the row of sturdy houses across the street. Over their roofs, further back, the horizon offered the faintest glimmer of golden sun. She turned and walked to her jeans, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, and crumpled it in her fist. When she missed the trash, Aoife pounced on the cellophane-wrapped ball, then flicked it between his paws as if it were a pest. J. William Ross writes poetry and prose from Lakewood, Ohio. Along with winning the Press-53 53-Word Story Competition, he has been published in The Lakewood Observer and Prime Number Magazine. After recently committing the bulk of his free time to cultivating his literary endeavors, he has felt a deepening sense of purpose and solace. He enjoys spending time with his creative, kindhearted son and their exceptionally vocal cat.