This Davis, an almost daily
dose, swirls silence, and I
remember the taste of peated malt
no longer in the menu of my nights.
This table lamp and those windows
you loved. I can turn on and off
to make you a butterfly or a moth.
This Davis, Miles, is a broken vinyl.
The calloused dinner is a cold gun.
--
The author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' and 'How To Burn Memories Using a Pocket Torch' has ten books to his credit. He is a journalist, father of a four-year-old, illustrator, and an editor. His works have been translated into twelve languages and published across the globe.
On a beach,
lying in a hammock,
under a palm tree,
a few feet from the water,
I remember
what my professor said
about why even
the greatest of empires
ultimately fall.
He didn’t mention
beaches and hammocks
and palm trees and water
but I think that’s
what he meant.
--
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
I’m thinking of my years in prison:
the self-contained air stale with smoke.
I rarely had an allergy attack,
though there were times I felt I couldn’t breathe.
Other cons—call them patrons
of the Great Discontent—came & went,
their time on the rec yard spent
running laps, lifting weights,
shooting hoops with flattened balls.
I stalled, stayed in, listened to music
on my headphones, read books
in the absence of nature.
Those were the days—a small lie
I tell myself on the other side
of a sneezing fit, my skin itchy,
hair weighed down with grit.
Would I rather have prison
than Springtime? No,
I’ll take the rain, its mix
of force & tenderness, a cleansing.
--
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Beyond bombs
ears tune out nightly news—
Tune into fists-pounded walls
shrieks out the mouth
seeping through from flat 22.
Between blowouts
chaos is a distant backdrop—
Shifting eyes, twitching energy
paint home city sidewalks
into lands of wandering lost.
Above smoke plumes
Heaven’s in sight—
floating sweatshop in the sky
tasking a million battered infant angels
to knit a turtleneck too tight—
And our world chokes in it.
--
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like Cholla Needles, The New Yorker, The Literary Hatchet and others. https://www.instagram.com/roquewrites2009/