A Poem by Martin Willitts, Jr.

Planting After Being Told It Is Too Risky After Surgery

I have had one too many near misses,
one too many visits to the emergency room.
Too many near misses are not good for the heart.

The ground is still frozen now.  It would shatter
from icy sheets into cracked glass.  The urge
to plant another year is stronger than the need to rest.

Once again it was a false alarm.
Just like seeds might be dormant, hiding below
the surface, malingering, disease hides.

I say enough is enough.
Like the first soldier to rush towards the unknown,
all luck, all planting, all risks, are unknown.

Martin Willitts, Jr. is a retired librarian.  He has appeared in many of the Kind of a Hurricane Press anthologies.  Plus he has two ebooks on the site.  He has over 20 chapbooks, plus he has 11 full-length collections including, How to Be Silent (FutureCycle Press, 2016).  He recently won a large poetry grant in New York.

A Poem by Michael Magee

Odysseus at the Mall

I am lost in the world
of American Eagle Outfitters
and Verizon Wireless
looking for a hall of mirrors,
or a Hallmark card to send
to Penelope and wonder
if she is a plus-size woman now
so I look in the window
of Torrid see a zebra stripe
and think:  maybe a sheepskin.

How moccasins would soothe
my aching feet, perhaps a pedicure
and like a second-hand carnie I stand
next to a booth near Cinnabon.
What about a Zale's diamond?
Instead I decide to buy a thermos
for coffee with a memento mermaid
of my trip across the Mediterranean
warm enough to hold to my cold lips.
Then I order an extra tall with foam.

Michael Magee's poems have appeared in Pennine Ink (Great Britain), Staxtes Greek Literary Journal, Avocet and Poetry/Atlas.com  He draws heavily from classical references in these poems, updating them in the modern vernacular, and using mythology as a way to express his own dreams.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

It Takes A Man

I give my wife
instructions on how
these things are done,
how they have
always been done.

ayaz daryl nielsen, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/125+ issues), homes for poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Shemom, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane Press and online at bear creek haiku.

A Poem by Norma Ketzis Bernstock

What He Did

He called her doll baby,
pussy cat, sweet pea of mine.

Called her hungry whore,
hell-bent, wild-eyed wench.

Called her baby doll delight,
honey comb caress.

She loved satin and pink
baby doll the best.

Hated black and blue
wild-eyed wench.

Norma Ketzis Bernstock's poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Connecticut River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Stillwater Review, Exit 13, Edison Review and the anthology, Paterson, the Poets' City.  Her chapbook, Don't Write a Poem About Me After I'm Dead, was published in 2011.  Her previous achievements include a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and recognition by the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.

Two Poems by Suzette Bishop

Video of My Nephew's Wedding

No audio.

Bridesmaids in black.

The grandmother
who will die
a few months later,
zips down the aisle
in her power chair.

The bride carries a prayer book
with white ribbons.

Shoes like a slide
for the foot's sole.

Her mother and father
give her away.

Her fully lifted breasts
face him as they mouth
the vows.

My mother wishes
she could have given
my sister and I
a wedding like this.

The long veil
covers the altar steps
as snow or a rippling
sheet of ice covers
a mountainside.



Echocardiogram

I saw my heart and all the lightning storms there
in watery sound waves, red electrical eruptions

showing the storm moving toward us
and nothing we can do to stop it.

Pumping under a static gray, gauze screen
sudden yellows, reds, purple-blues,

what I think of you and thought was hidden
inside my heart,

inside my rib cage,
inside my left breast under your palm.

Suzette Bishop teaches at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas.  She has published three books of poetry, Hive-Mind, Horse-Minded and She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, and a chapbook, Cold Knife Surgery.  Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Jellyfish Whispers, Free State Review, New Texas, Borderlands, Concho River Review, Journal of Texas Women Writers, Aries, and in the anthologies The Four Season Anthology, Imagination & Place:  An Anthology, The Virago Book of Birth Poetry, and American Ghost:  Poets on Life after Industry.  Her poems have won the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize Contest and Honorable Mention in the Pen 2 Paper Contest sponsored by the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities.

A Poem by Donna Spector

Stratford from the Avon

     -- a photograph by Irene Miller

Fog on the river, ice below.
Black branches flare,
recede into mist.  Orange street
lamps light the lonely
woman in her red coat.  She has
nowhere to go, wanders
over rivers, back and forth,
the way I drive by
graveyards, calling greetings,
consolations, to people
I don't know.

Look!  A church steeple rises
faintly into a gray sky,
its spire, topped by a cross,
tries to touch some meaning,
something universal,
a greeting or a consolation.

Donna Spector is a playwright as well as a fiction writer and poet.  Her plays have appeared Off Broadway, regionally and in Canada, Ireland and Greece.  Her play Golden Ladder was published in Women Playwrights:  The Best Plays of 2002.  Winner of the Masters Poetry Prize and member of Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study in Greece.  A program of her aired on Australian national radio, and her poems, plays, stories and monologues have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including The Greensboro Review, Poet & Critic, Sycamore Review, Gaia, Notre Dame Review, Parabola, Rattle, The Connecticut River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, The Paterson Literary Review and American Life in Poetry.  The Woman Who Married Herself, a Sinclair Poetry Prize finalist, was published in 2010 by Evening Street Press, and she is now an associate editor of that press.

A Poem by Steve Carter

Patient

he dwells within
walls
of his own making

waking
to walk
from window
looking out
to inward looking
window

carrying demons
in his feet

Steve Carter is a writer and jazz guitarist.  He taught music and English at Berkeley College of Music.  His first book of poems, Intermodulations, was recently published by Maat Publishing (www.maatpublishing.net).  His poetry has appeared in many magazines, including Hanging Loose, Carolina Review, Stand, and Clackamas Literary Review.  He has 10 CDs of his music available on his independent record label, Frogstory Records (www.frogstoryrecords.com).