Alex Barr: No Escape

There it was, on the face

of the last log I lifted into the burner

crawling across the rings

wondering where to go.

I would have pulled the log out

but it was already flaming, and

I didn’t have the raku pottery tongs.

The woodlouse fell into the fiery embers.

Oh yes, I would have laughed

if I was like the pilot

heading for home, delighted

with a successful mission,

leaving a child writhing

in white phosphorus.

Alex Barr’s recent poetry is in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Quagmire Magazine, Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Scintilla, The Dark Horse, Orbis, Silver Birch Press, BlueHouse Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Acumen, and Third Wednesday Magazine. His collections are Letting in the Carnival from Peterloo and Henry’s Bridge from Starborn. 

Christopher Woods: The Road

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show, Twelve from Texas, was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. Gallery: https://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283

PBJ: untitled

Something told me 

This was it

Like the way a teacher would shout 

Last lap boys 

And you sprint for your life 

Like my uncle seeing the end 

With a nail gun to his head 

But you don’t wanna go out like that 

Even he knew that when he set it down 

You wanna finish at the end 

Totally exhausted 

Not caring what position you’re in 

Just knowing you gave out 

So much fucking love 

That even the gods 

Want to see you 

Live one more day 

PBJ has poems published in Ireland, the UK and Canada. His first story was published by the BBC at 19 years old. His first film was screened at The Playhouse in Derry, and he wrote a column for the International Times called Street Writer. 

CL Bledsoe: That High Lonesome House

It almost snowed. So close to winter, my feet

perpetually cold. My daughter screamed awake

with a spider crawling down the wall above her bed,

she’d just gotten to sleep in spite of a nasty cough.

There’s so much to do before spring. I have to find

love. I have to clean the bathroom. The kitchen. My soul.

I can sell books to pay someone. Does that make me

a class traitor or just tired? But I’m grateful

for the books, grateful for the updates on my father,

dying. Coming home to someone else’s noise.

We used to roll down the ridge, trying to flush

snakes. One of them chased me up a fence one

time. My sister swears she remembers carrying

me through the snow after a seizure, but I didn’t have

those until my preteens. Once, my sister called

to ask if the lake was frozen. I ran to the barbed wire

fence in my underwear and climbed up to look,

but got caught in the barbs and called to mom

to help, afraid the neighbours would hear down the hill

and look up to catch me, so I climbed out of them,

left them on the fence, and ran back to the TV. 

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Edilson Afonso Ferreira: Silent Witnesses

It is common our disputes about this and that.

Really, almost daily, we are at opposite sides.

Friends say we are not well-settled a couple,

and so misjudgement, I know, hurts us equally.

In the deeps of night, standing awake in bed,

I look at you asleep and feel all friends’ error.

Who would bear testimony of us, I ask myself.

Walls and roofs surely know our inmost life

but they do not speak, are invalid witnesses.

I ask them if just to me would they say of us. 

They say of our confronts, furies, rough words

and revilements but also remember our hugs

and hot kisses. Also, remember having heard  

some words like it is cold out, dear, wear your

coat or don’t be late, darling, some little things

only beloved ones are capable to.

They say we are at hard and arduous a battle,  

on pursuing, although scarce, a bit of true love. 

They also say to keep the route and fear nothing.

Tiles and bricks, indeed, they are, but perceive

unlike my best friends, the very plot of the play.

First published in TWJ Magazine, October 2014.

A Brazilian poet, Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 80, lives in a small town (Formiga-MG) with wife, three sons and a granddaughter and writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Largely published in literary journals, he began writing at age 64.  Has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is the author of 2 Poetry Collections, Lonely Sailor and Joie de Vivre.

Laura Lee Lucas: The Remains of the Canopy

Yesterday they were still here

and still eating:

That terrible non-sound of holes

appearing in leaves, trees, stalks of grass.

Worst, the sensation in the eye,

that the land moved and breathed,

that the mass of creatures was the thing

we lived upon.

This morning they were gone.

We sat beneath the remains

of the canopy,

remembering the forest whole,

and we held each other,

and looked out on the empty fields,

grateful for our unpierced skin,

for the silent air.

Laura Lee Lucas (she/her) is a VONA/Voices fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, and has received financial support from Artist Trust.  Her work has appeared in Corvid Queen, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, Octavos, Black Imagination, Vapid Kitten, and the Dead of Winter II anthology, among others. www.lauralucas.net

Maurice Devitt: Spring Day

After months of silence, the magnolia

have started to clear their throats,

fledgling beaks bursting into the sky,

while the ducks in Ranelagh Gardens

paddle in pairs around the stagnant pond,

shadowing the couples strolling on the bank.

The world is consumed by what will happen

next, knowing, that even when a decision

is made, it is only the beginning,

and so much depends on the mood

of the heron, abstracted

in the shallows, as though listening

on earbuds to the 3.30 from Haydock

and counting down the days

for the first ducklings to arrive.

Maurice Devitt is Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site. His Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, ‘Some of These Stories are True’, was published by Doire Press in 2023.