I’m flummoxed by the blatant disregard for etiquette
you showed while eating your McDonald’s fries on Instagram
as though your mother didn’t pay three grand
and schedule her chemo appointments around your weekly lessons
at finishing school to prepare you for just such a moment
when you’d be eating without her.
Morgan Lael intentionally leaves a single drop of olive oil on all of her best shirts as an awareness building exercise.
Inside my fortune cookie
I find nothing –
no paper slip,
no words, no winning numbers –
nothing
but a presence of almonds
grown on a rain-soaked hillside.
Jon Densford lives in Memphis and has had several poems appear in print and online publications, including his favorites Right Hand Pointing and One Sentence Poems.
In the unrelenting battle against doggerel and sloth, J.I. (Judy) Kleinberg wields recycle-bin magazines, x-acto knife, and glue.
Our fights were a barrage of arrows
going to the softest places,
as if everything depended
on the outcome.
On this last desperate voyage,
in a wreck of broken masts
and shredded sails, we founder,
sink, don’t realize we’ve drowned
until we’re beyond soundings,
at fathoms so deep no lead
and line can find us, the currents
pulling our remains toward
different shores.
Sarah Russell is still trying to describe the moon in a way that isn’t cheesy and blogs about it at sarahrussellpoetry.net.
I mark the scars of long gone trees, palm the walls of memory— linoleum green kitchen, window where Grandpa once asked if I saw the woman outside smiling, dusty room where I first learned what Alzheimer’s meant.
Tara Roeder teaches writing in Queens, New York.
Oh, mashup of poetry and friction,
all here-ness and bungle,
here’s to years of trust, flashes of huzzah,
the grudging forgiveness,
and the halleluiah.
The B&B where I
bathed in lavender (before
bubbles could make me cry)
lies around the corner from
the Misery—
first syllables of
the hospital where you were
never born.
Angeline Schellenberg, author of Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), lives in Winnipeg, Canada, with her husband, two teenagers, and a German Shepherd-Corgi.
You reach over the rail
for my hand, smile, and say
I love you, Edith
and I want to tell you
Grandpa, it’s me
but my aunt Edie is a beauty,
my age in 1977—the year
you relive in your mind,
so glad your little girl is here.
It’s thirty-years-old and still ticking
people off, like the drunk uncle who
remembers all the family stories, tangos like
nobody’s business
and fixes all our cars for free so
we can’t cut him off.
Angeline Schellenberg, author of Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), lives in Winnipeg, Canada, with her husband, two teenagers, and a German Shepherd-Corgi.
A raven pecking at
a seedling of somebody’s love.
H. Edgar Hix is always impressed by people who will put their lives where their beliefs are, though not always with their beliefs.