Issue #18

In my recycle bin I came across the woods,
I tried to restore the woods 
Undo and redo woods
But once deleted it can’t be restored
I tried to retrieve the data from Meta
The cloud after the cloud was empty
The mouse was not working 
Now, the woods are difficult to retrieve

Pulkita Anand is an avid reader of poetry. She has translated one short story collection, “Tribal Tales from Jhabua”. Author of two children’s e-books, her  eco-poetry collection is we were not born to be erased. Her creative works have been published in: Shortstory Kids, Twist and Twain, Tint Journal, Lapis Lazuli, The Creativity Webzine, Winc Magazine (Issue 1, 2, 5 &7), Stanza Cannon, Superpresent, Muse,Madwomen in the Attic, Poetica#11 &12,  NCTE, The Uglywriters, Impspired (online &print issue) redsoethorns Journal (online) and magazine, Kritya, The Amazine, Carmina Magazine, Origami Press, Asiatic, Inanna Publication, Bronze Bird Books, New Verse News, Hakara Journal, Madras Courier, Green Verse: An anthology of poems for our planet (Saraband Publication), Comparative Women, State of Matter, Convergence anthology (selected), MAI and elsewhere.

While I perseverate on the Eternal, dance
                 metaphorically with Los, Orc, and Urizon,
attempt to consummate the marriage of heaven
                and hell,
you wander around a manicured field whacking
                 a manufactured, mass-produced, testicle
with one of your shiny, expensive, phalluses 
                 you gratuitously call a club—an insult
to every caveman, every Barney and Fred, 
                who ever lived.

You whack away in onanistic ignorance while
                 I see the universe in a grain from one 
of your goofy sand traps. While you need 
                 an assistant to help you figure out which
iron will get a hole to suck down one of your balls,
                 I hope to glimpse the ghost of a flee.

And when that final hour arrives, I will fall through
                 the dark abyss of Albion’s destruction 
while you wiggle and squirm, sizing up your shot
                 on that first, and last, infinite tee. 

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His eighth full-length poetry collection is Miracles That Keep Me Going (WordTech Editions, 2023). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

Oh, that it had happened nearer
the middle than closer to the end.
Then it would have been easier to defend
all the mistakes as fertilizer for some fall flowers.
Such are the regrets of age, brown withered leaves
gathered by the wind in a window well,
each once a promise but now of little use,
just dry crunch in the hand, dull flecks
soon to become dirt. Perhaps someone else’s
buds will spring from it.

After a newspaper career, Eric Chiles began teaching writing and journalism at colleges in the Lehigh Valley. He is the author of “What Was and Will Be” (Resource Publications, 2024, available on Amazon) and the chapbook “Caught in Between” (Desert Willow Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared or forthcoming in dozens of journals including 3Elements Review, Allegro, Chiron Review, Comstock Review, I-70 Review, Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, Star 82 Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2014 he completed a 10-year section hike of the Appalachian Trail.

I’m neither all ‘Good’
nor ‘Bad’
… rarely Indifferent.
An old, wooden
stairway…
creaky, uneven,
with the odd edge
and step missing.
I am becoming
a Haunted House…
nostalgic about
the ‘Missing Gaps’
… stolen by Lost
Chances and Errors
along Life’s Pathway.

Paul Tristram is a widely published Welsh writer. He yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet. His novel “Crazy Like Emotion”, collection of shorter fiction “Kicking Back Drunk ‘Round The Candletree Graves” and full-length poetry collections “The Dark Side Of British Poetry: Book 1 of Urban, Cinematic, Degeneration” and “It Is Big And It Is Clever: Book 1 of A Punk Rock Hostile Takeover” are all available by Close To The Bone Publishing.

You have a special kind of light 
It’s like moonlight 
So powerful yet so subtle 
You may not be as bright as the sun 
But you’re much more unique 
You can control the tides 
While illuminating the sky on the darkest night

You shimmer so brightly during a full moon 
Creating the most beautiful of landscapes 

Your kindness never ends 
Your light is as bright as a star 
You beautifully glow all the time 
So much so, people are fascinated by you 

Others may not be able to fathom how you shine so brilliantly 
But there are some who profoundly understand

So pay attention to your radiance 
And never let anyone dim your shine 

Nicole Rissmiller is a poet, abstract artist, and musician residing in Bethlehem, PA.  She is passionate about all types of art and social justice issues. She has a B.A. in sociology from Moravian University.  She likes to cook, bake and read in her free time. Instagram: @nicolethenostalgic

Joshua Osatchuck has been in the service industry for almost 15 years, everything from bartending to bar managing. But what he loves to do most is read, Thomas Moore, Hemingway, Bradbury, just about any classic you could think of. The admiration he has for literature is almost too hard to explain. However, what he needs to do is write! Saying that it is a passion would be a lie, it’s a necessity. He writes because it’s his way of speaking, of bringing balance to my life in a world where balance is almost never achieved. If he didn’t write he might as well live his entire life in an empty room where he couldn’t talk to anyone, and no one could talk to him.  

Our love mixes with seaweed, 
a sweet memory, 
sprinkled with salt. It grows
between the breeze
and the hurricane, 
the fruit of an inner struggle.

The green waves crash
in a murmur that
cools the warm and
ancient sand; limits; perception.
New tides of change
cast our minds back; 
the courage to exist.
In the space between
ancientness and nowness, 
our perfect love is eternal, 
a song for a dance, 
an invisible one, and
a wave-like movement
on the shores of our hearts.
We can feel our holy angels, 
wounded wings, 
echoes of a distant cry.
In every salty breath, a prayer

and a promise.
Between freedom and serfdom, 
we fathom our dodecahedral geodesic, 
spiritual sphere out.
The reality is circumjacent; 
contiguous eyesight.
The voice of God becomes an echo
to inhabit the twilight world.

Marieta Maglas’ publication credits include: The MockingOwl Roost, Lothlorien Journal, Verse-Virtual, Silver Birch Press, Sybaritic Press, Kingfisher Poetry, Oddville Press,  Prolific Press, Dashboard Horus, Coin-Operated Press, Mayari Literature, Synchronized Chaos, Al-Khemia Poetica, PentaCat Press, The Queer Gaze, Phoenix Z Publishing, All Your Poems Magazine, Journal of the Akita International Haiku, and others published the poems of Marieta Maglas in anthologies like Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, Nancy Drew Anthology, The Cardinal Anthology Vol. 3, Ain’t no Deadbeats Around Here, and Startled by MUSIC 2023.

So she brought to the party a string bean casserole:
Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, canned beans, and onion rings,
also canned, crumbled on top. A staple at pot-lucks
in the suburbs—good housekeeping’s seal of approval.
She was 16, and this was a homecoming party,
back from 6 months at an Indian Ashram—home base
of Guru Baby-ji, and strict macrobiotics.
My fellow zazeners and Sufis and some bhaktis
in white tunics and baggy pantaloons, her in her
tube top, cutoffs. Steve going on about colonics.
They all adored her, especially the guys drooling
into celibate beards, girls cleansed and ovulating.
Yes, I was mortified then, but not more mortified
than I am now, thirty years, for having been mortified.

Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Tupelo, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021 and Foxholes in 2025.
@LeonardKress

A
black
coffee
mug, half-full
of Half and Half and
half-full of one, two, three four shots
of espresso, sitting right next to a copy of
the New York Times crossword puzzle and the
complete cantos of Ezra Pound, both only
half-finished and, despite a few half-hearted attempts
at resuscitating them, most
likely to remain
that way for
sometime
to
come.

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two collections of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in- residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 2024).” He lives somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe.