James Diaz
This Life We’ve Lived

But imagine this feather bed
and how I have strayed into the light
like a derailed train
in the autumn’s mix of amber
softly blowing up someone’s kicked about dreams
I have lived this life
you might say
to no one in particular
late at night
by the railroad tracks
where you have waited for years
just to belong
to something tangible and stronger than you are
right now
the dogs are baying at the moon
twice removed
from all you may have done
or failed to do
before this moment
and if love is just the noise between one season
brushed against another, if it’s something you’ve never really known
or owned or been held up in
like light from the farthest side of the world
is it not worth it anyway?
a train that never comes
the waiting, the hurting
the healing howling climbing
up up up
too far in this thing to ever come back down
I have lived this life.

—Submitted on 08/29/2020

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Gone Lawn, The Collidescope, Thimble Lit Mag, BlogNostics, Poetry Breakfast, and other journals.

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James Diaz
Not So Tough After All

I walk back inside
broken hand

skin fractal / lightning rattle
smallest stove / biggest bond of bone

starling staggering up
sketching out all the debris in me

chalk lines on pavement
filling in as a prayer—for tonight

you can’t afford to know too much about these things
where they come from

a streak of golden—a so-long kinda song
in scar light

and so I twist myself into a bird
under a burning bed

the moon is / half-way home
better than no home at all

it’s always uphill
ankle broke—broke—and fucked…

once I knew a thing
sometimes, I still do, I guess

each year gets a little longer
and somehow, despite experience, harder to bear

that’s how it is
you think you have forever

but you don’t
only it felt that way once

and here you are
broken bird twisted

stagger bruise light
blurred up along the interstate

when I’m gone—
tell em I left happy

and forgiven
and in love

with everything
that ever happened to me.

—Submitted on 08/29/2020

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Gone Lawn, The Collidescope, Thimble Lit Mag, BlogNostics, Poetry Breakfast, and other journals. 

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Zack Hoffman
On Your Left

there is an indentation
on the left side cushion
beige couch ass print
and a target on my back
stay home or die old man

40 inches of Samsung with a sound bar
pictures and voices filling me so I don’t listen to myself
watch nothing and everything bouncing from the screen
Steven King says, “You have to give up the glass tit”
but it’s the only tit I’ve got
alone consulting depression

a chained-up basement bicycle
becomes a reclamation project
recycles me
moves me outside
where children chalk the streets
trees filter oxygen while dogs bark
wind blows the target off my back
an hour of redemption

—Submitted on 08/25/2020

Zack Hoffman lives in Seattle. His poetry has appeared in the Licton Springs Review, the art and literary journal of North Seattle College.

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Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink
College Bound

As I press the tape along the skirtboard
Running the length of your new room
I walk the
Timeline I followed through
To your eighteenth birthday.

Covid-driven into the creation
Of an old-fashioned album: A safely
Immobile
Unadulterated travel
Into your life, from birth to online
Graduation, honours based on
Algorithms. What of it?
You reined in to success.

And there’s been time to digest.
Meeting you in stages along the sixty-six
Thousand pics on our cloud, sifting
Through the ages, sorting
Restoring, year by year,
The fluid order of things.
A monumental summer this
Labour of love.

In doing so,
My senses like razors cut into
Shots of long ago: Here a park on a
Vancouver afternoon, you rolling over uncle’s
Back before the ice cream treat,
Screams of children by the water, mottled
Green, the frisbee lying at the ready.

All this rushed at me in waves this
Re-journeying with you to
Beloved worlds, albeit through
The workings of
My own narrowed lens.

And now here you stand with your
Childhood in a book, complete with penned-in
Comments
Lest you forget.

You’ll now be walking the tightrope
Balancing
Accumulated jacketed visions against
Your own prisms of
Revelation.

Ah, when I recall freedoms of student life, my
Heart leaps
For you.
Explore, assert your views, point your phone
In all directions, correct the light.
But you are not the type for self-styling.
Your modesty on Instagram
Speaks volumes.

And that masking tape I’m pressing, the coat of
Paint which follows to
Brighten the shabby space
Transformed,
That Picasso still life
Meant to enliven your mealtimes,
Each of us holding on to a wing
Of yours, wishing it might
Tremble just a little.

Well, there’s nothing more for us to do
But drive on back.

Leave our front door key
In the familiar hiding place,
For whenever you decide on a
Surprise to what’s no
Longer your residence

Yet a shelter all the same, to draw
Respite from, before returning to
Another round
Of studied independence.

—Submitted on 08/24/2020

Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink is of German-Indian background, grew up in Canada, and teaches English in Toulouse, France.

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Peggy Dobreer
Untrust With Songbirds

My room cartons in cardboard, string-sealed boxes
Death so close you could throw a stone home
 
            A stone like death that throws its song home
            My stance trembles with brown thrasher songs
 
Brown thrashers tremble in their wilderness of song
I turn trail and run from a faint field of sky 
 
            I am this faint field of sky and won’t turn or run
            I am a citadel of ghost prayer, a cranial prison
 
A cranial prison is a citadel of prayers and ghosts
I hear only one true sound—like a baby—laughing
 
            A baby laughing strikes one note only                
            Like lovers gasping to find their own salvation
 
I grasp at my lover to trust our found salvation
My room cartons in cardboard, string-sealed boxes

—Submitted on 08/24/2020

Peggy Dobreer is the author of Drop and Dazzle (Moon Tide Press, 2018) and In The Lake of Your Bones (Moon Tide Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Press, Rise Up Review, Cultural Weekly, Poetic Diversity, The Juice Bar, and other journals. She lives in Southern California. 

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Simon Leonard
Out of Breath

Castro Urdiales, August 2020

We hoped for August the way you hope for a cure —
prayer we never got around to voicing.

From this bridge
between what was a fortress
and what is not quite a church,
now a lighthouse collecting spray,
in a normal summer, bronze daggers trust
into thrusting water,
burnished arms stretch roaring
to a buoy, at the end of air.

Treading tides
against the expanse of ocean, they turn,
to measure themselves
against the vertigo in their lungs,
the depth beneath, the weight within; the certainty
unless their arms and legs keep churning,
the bulk of their bodies will kill them,
back towards gaping sand.

From the bridge, this August,
you can just make out
stripped branches swaying by the shore —
so many unrecited prayers
for when breathing was a given.

—Submitted on 08/21/2020

Simon Leonard teaches secondary school in Germany and has a deep connection to Spain. His work has appeared in Envoi, Orbis, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Poetry Kit, and other journals.

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Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink
“Half-breed,”

She called me, smiling, malice in her eyes,
The day I told her my story.
A term I thought she could only have learned
Growing up in the United States.
I returned the smile, though stunned and
Stung by the cruel misnomer,
Diametrically opposed to the true
Breeding of anyone blessed with more
Than merely one passport, one origin.
Those who learn early on to grasp
The nuances of
Each parent’s language who tread
Head high
On (un)familiar turf either side of
The Atlantic, or other waters, who do not jumble or falter
On etiquette but see the world as their
Oyster. Who do not endlessly complain
Compare and find WASP material the only
Readable guide.
As freely as the sap flows through the maple
Is diversity inscribed in the DNA
Of the nation
I hail from. So thoroughly bred into our
Bones, despite the cold of those endless
Winters,
Lies the assurance
That exponential
Growth stems from the blood rushing through
Veins of intertwined members on
Passionate nights of discovery. An Other
Body complete with baggage we accept to
Face carry embrace, make our own.
Histories remembered rekindled
Listened to. Applied knowledge that beauty
Appears like a rainbow arching across the
Grey zones.
How better equipped can one be to find
Out-of-the-box solutions
Than having grown up
On a mix of lentils frankfurters
Drunk feni, diluted
With coke, sampled poutine
On occasion
Yet truly Indulged in tourtière and cheered on
The only hockey team that ever really mattered?
Our street’s segregation ran across language lines and we kids,
Trilingual caramelized-skinned, came from a
Planet so odd our neighbours knew not
How to size us up and I felt I belonged only once I’d landed
At the downtown high school of
United nations,
Where every face every name
Became a melody, a heralding call of
Identities anchored in
Split-second decisions, risk, memory and
New beginnings.
On full moon nights gliding across the local ice rink
Or lying atop our mountain of snow piled high
By the plough, lights flashing, in
A moment of truce with the enemy
Gazing up at the stars
I could feel all the great
Worlds inside me
Converge. And
Imagine myself later on come spring
Striving to find
A certain blossom of blue
Coaxed into view solely by
Those born and bred
To make the long climb, see far and wide,
Take the time,
Recognize.
I’d pluck it out gently left hand shading petals,
Drink in all its glory, then gift it to a friend.
No halfway measures.

—Submitted on 08/21/2020

Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink is of German-Indian background, grew up in Canada, and teaches English in Toulouse, France.

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Chad Parenteau
DNC Tankas

Bernie Sanders Jesus Tanka, Take Three

Say it one more time.
Bernie Sanders Jesus has
died. He has risen. 
He will never run again.
He will never run again. 


Obama Jesus Tanka

With all in awe and
hashtagging #mymessiah 
Obama Jesus
performs the same miracle
of simply not being worst. 


Joe Biden Jesus Tanka

Joe Biden Jesus
moved aside his own grave’s stone,
came into the light,
found himself a flaming sword,
hoped he knew how to use it.


AOC Jesus Tanka

AOC Jesus
only have seven stations
of the cr


Robert Trump Jesus Tanka

Robert Trump Jesus.
His cross has eighteen stations.
His older brother
played golf through each one of them,
left before the ascension. 

—Submitted on 08/21/2020

Chad Parenteau is the author of The Collapsed Bookshelf (Tell-Tale Chapbooks, 2020) and Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His poems have appeared in Résonancee, Boston Literary Magazine, Queen Mob’s Tea-House, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, and other journals. He is associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. Online at chadparenteaupoetforhire.com.

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Susan Gubernat
Evening, Corona

Jasmine scents reach
the balcony in quarantine

as the children’s voices do—
knights and villains

flashes of a fake sword,
real threats of

dinner and bedtime.
A caged parakeet’s

shrill whistle ends
the games again and again

though no one listens.
Vega pierces the night sky,

pinhole to the infinite.
No more standing in line,

we plead, no more mumbling
behind masks.

And when I touch you
with a gloved finger

something warns me still—
it isn’t safe, isn’t safe.

—Submitted on 08/17/2020

Susan Gubernat is the author of The Zoo at Night (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Analog House (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions, 1999). Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and other journals. Gubernat holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. A professor emerita of English at California State University, East Bay, she has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Newark, Gubernat lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Francis Fernandes
Cologne

The sun was less hot in the evening
so we went out to find something
to eat, in this two-thousand-year-old
city on the Rhine given its name
by the wife of a Roman emperor
and mother of the dark one
who burned for the arts and thought
nothing of committing a little
matricide. The grey-black stone cathedral
loomed over us, another reminder
of hundreds of years of toil and
craftsmanship, war and fire. We picked
Google’s brain and after some
meandering came to a small Italian
place hidden in the back alleys
where we ate very large pizzas and
drank Kölsch and Apfelschorle
by an open window. The whole week
was like a sauna, and now suddenly
the sky darkened and cracked, and the rain
poured down, flooding the streets as though
the Kölner Dom had opened a hatch
in the aft of its massive vessel and centuries
of rivulets coursed down the street
just four feet from our table, cyclists
pushing on, oblivious of the statues
and altar pieces, the crowns
and zucchettos bobbing over
the roiling cobblestones. The relics
of the Three Magi had broken free
from their fancy housing made of silver
and filigreed gold: I could tell
it was their bones, their tattered garments,
because I had taken a peek when
the guide had turned to leave and my
teenage daughter had followed the rest of
the devotees—with a Bluetooth bud in
one ear since she had agreed
to do the tour only if she could half
listen to her music. Which she had also
been doing here, in fact, at least until
the pizzas were in front of us,
between fork and knife, and the pretty
waitress had said Prego. Buon appetito.
She ate with relish, I was glad to see.
At least one thing I had done right.
I smiled and nodded towards the scattered
debris and the remains of wisdom
outside the window. They were taken
from Constantinople to Milan in three
hundred something and then eight
hundred years later stolen
by Frederick Barbarossa and brought
here. They built this huge
cathedral just so the three of them
would have a proper shrine. And now
look! She smiled back and said, Papa,
can you stop it finally! I was there, too,
remember? And then she pointed
to my pizza with her knife. Stop worrying
so much. Why don’t you just eat? This
crust is so amazing!

—Submitted on 08/21/2020

Francis Fernandes grew up in the US and Canada, and lives in Germany, where he writes and teaches.

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