continue
Chelsey van der Munnik
[Minor]
guilt
arrives
prison dust
waiting to
escape
swallow
all of it
grain by
grain
Chelsey van der Munnik
Test
This piss-covered stick is my loaded gun
Two pink lines making two bleeding holes
One in my mother who saw it coming
And turns her nose up
One for my father, clueless and crying
And trying to hug it out
I suppose I knew I would kill them this way
Chelsey van der Munnik
Nobody
wants
to touch
a pregnant
fourteeen-
year-old's
belly.
Robert Russell
Independence Day Forecast,
Davidson Park Cemetery
Intermittent clouds Intermittent
clouds Intermittent clouds
Intermittent clouds Partly
cloudy
Someone’s pretty baby
beneath the earth
where I stand watching
a cloud form a face.
Robert Russell
There will be ten more minutes
until the end of this world.
Please check the area around you
so you don’t forget anything important.
On behalf of the frog,
the twilight, the rain,
and the entire crew
I’d like to thank you for joining us and noticing.
That’s really all there was to it.
Wasn’t it wonderful?
Thank You for Flying
Michael Kriesel
Coral Bay, Australia
A herd of prehistoric deer drowned here,
horns a forest now of blood-red coral
scratching at our boat’s glass window.
Our tour guide finds what he’s been looking for:
a brain coral big as a car, breathing
warm sea water for nine hundred years.
Hung over sailors, we hover above it.
The water is calm as a floor.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A Few Little Questions
What if your dog
talked back to you in baby talk?
What if you looked straight into the eyes of the guy
rubbing your windshield with a dirty rag?
What if you stopped pretending
good thoughts were the same as good deeds?
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
On I-44
They called it the Hunter’s moon,
a pie pan
eerily round and gilt
that gives enough light
to see a coyote
in a harvested
cornfield, encampments
strewn over
the plains frontier.
A marauding moon
before the long Oklahoma afternoons,
the small towns
leaning toward the interstate
the scraped, windy
spaces in between.
Roberta Feins
“In my grandfather’s day, manuscripts flew about like butterflies.”
Quote from Aubrey’s Brief Lives c. 1690
Destroy a book
Smear the page with chocolate crumbs (what a critic!)
Sew shut its binding muzzle its folios
Tear up its pages steep them in wine.
Post it to Amazonia leaf-cutter ants raise fungi on its chapters.
Shoot it into space rotating in geosynchronous orbit.
Slide it across Arctic ice Toss chunks to hungry sled-dogs.
Read the pattern of its ashes above the bonfire.
Jab meat hooks into its binding a gutted carcass, hanging.
Issue ear-plugs to everyone on earth cut out their eyes.
Patrick Theron Erickson
The sun
rocks back
on its haunches
the stars
on its heels
and the earth turns
on its axis
The moon rolls in
raising its havoc
without ever registering
on the Richter scale.
Why Does the Earth Roll So Slow?
Vanessa Wang
I love you for the things you own
Your marigolds, a poem,
A supercilious cat with Mr. Darcy’s soul
I judge you by how much you earn
Three smiles a day from strangers
Five story inspirations on a stroll
I like you because of where you live
A cottage in a fairytale
With lingering spirits and waiting legends
Too many books and too few utensils
I hate you for what you’ve achieved
For the things you own and the place you live
With so many friends your schedule is always full
You’ve gotten so far ahead and so far from me
I Love You for the Things You Own
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Contributors
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes barefoot in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro (Mad Hat Books, 2014). Check her website at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.
Ion Corcos has been published in Axolotl, Bitterzoet, Every Writer and Ishaan Literary Review. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He is currently travelling indefinitely with his partner, Lisa. He is also working on his first poetry collection, Like Clouds, and a chapbook inspired by Greece. Ion’s website is http://www.ioncorcos.wordpress.com.
Patrick Theron Erickson is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Recent work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Lavender Wolves Literary Journal, Futures Trading, Wilderness House Literary Review and Danse Macabre.
Roberta Feins received her MFA in poetry in 2007 from New England College. Her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review and The Gettysburg Review, among others. Her chapbook Something Like a River, was published by Moon Path Press in 2013. Roberta edits the e-'zine Switched On Gutenberg (http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org/)
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review. John Grey's first poem with us appeared in Right Hand Pointing Issue #2 in 2004.
Bellingham, Washington, freelance writer, artist and Pushcart-nominated poet J.I. Kleinberg is co-editor of Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington (Other Mind Press 2015). Selections from her series (1200+) of found-word collages have appeared recently in Diagram, Otoliths, Hedgerow, Yew Journal, Shadowgraph, Atlas & Alice, and elsewhere.
Winner of North American Review’s 2015 Hearst Prize, Michael Kriesel of Wausau, WI, was a print and broadcast journalist in the U.S. Navy for 10 years.
Sonya Plenefisch was raised in Sylvania, Ohio, but now lives and studies in Cardiff, Wales. Her work has previously appeared in Words Dance, Epigraph Magazine, Driftwood Press, and Right Hand Pointing. Her first collection Memoirs of a King was recently released, and more of her work can be found atshppoetry.tumblr.com.
Robert (Rusty) Russell is a recovering economist who now lives in San Miguel de Allende, MX., most of the year, where he tells stories (sometimes called “lies”), performs poetry on stage, and loafs all day long. He’s the author of the chapbook Witness, available on Amazon.com, and once led the poetry group, CheapAtAnyPrice Poets in Madison, WI.
Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer from Bangalore, India. She loves experimenting with Japanese short forms of poetry, as well as found/remixed pieces alike. Her work has most recently appeared in Otoliths, Red Bird, Lines + Stars, and Infinity's Kitchen. Shloka is the founding editor of Sonic Boom.
Chelsey van der Munnik is an SEO writer for an ad agency in upstate NY and a poem writer for herself. Her work has been published in ZPlatt, Crack The Spine, BROAD!, and Poetry Super Highway.
Vanessa Wang lives in Mountain View, California. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. You can find more of her writing at wangvanessa.com/publications
Clarence Wolfshohl lives with his writing, one dog and one cat in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri. In late 2014, his chapbook Equus Essence was published online by Right Hand Pointing, and more recently a digital chapbook Scattering Ashes was published by Virtual Artists Collective (nodding onion).
