The one with the slender body and easy eyes,
with a face carved from his darling mother,
whom you miss so, her skin resembling lace.

It was his laugh you miss most, him unable to
call out to you in those last moments and you
unable to go to him, hold him, relieve the pain.

You grip grief like a memento on the mantle.
I’ve seen it in your face, dark and gray. I watched
faith collide with events that sometimes befall small

boys, how you battled what came next, defying
the shadow that threatened to devour you without
a bite, reimagining a life in anger, the searing guilt that

no one could know, let alone understand – but you
never wanted understanding and you never wanted
anyone to know. So I sat you down and fed you because

food, I say, as though that is my answer when everything
else fails and you were not interested, but in time began
to pick at the dish I put before you as though you were

playing connect the dots. I asked you to tell me more about
the dream, how realistic it was, how you woke with a scream,
crushed under the weight of how real it seemed, until that scream

curdled the black blood that ran through me, how it poured out
of you, a blood that rent the tree canopy in two, unnerving
everything on land and in the ocean, rattling even the stars.

Michael Biegner has had poems published in Blooms, Poetry Storehouse, Silver Birch Press, Silkworm, WordPeace, and the Poets To Come anthology, in honor of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday.  His prose poem, “When Walt Whitman Was A Little Girl,” was made into a video short by North Carolina filmmaker Jim Haverkamp, where it has competed at various film festivals around the world and is available for viewing on Vimeo. Michael was a finalist in the 2017 Northampton Arts Council Biennial Call To Artists.

the bees circle the withered roses
they crawl over sterile, sun bleached petals
then on to the leaves

they scrape a substance
from the green surfaces
whatever they can get

they gather what’s left, hoard it
before the cold, before the end
as we do likewise

Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada.  He writes free verse poetry, much of it on the confessional side.  He has been published in Blognostics, Red Eft Review, Spillwords, Synchronized Chaos, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others.

The sky has all the charm of a double homicide.
The black cloud above my car says to me:
“This will teach you for going out in this rain
with a five dollar umbrella.”

This light is balsamic, not illuminating the road
very well, but it is not dark enough make the
headlights effective. To my left, the storm cloud
curls its finger at me, it beckons repentance.

I drive on. Behind me in the rear-view, car lights
are diamonds against a seasick green horizon, a
green without a splinter of mercy. The wind picks
up and my eyes scan for a funnel.

Off to the east, where the dark has not yet surrounded
the leftover blue of day, thunderheads tickle the
ionosphere, glow angelically. Fat droplets fall, tears,
I believe – of all the sadness of this world gathers

into these mauling storms. The ones that throw-down
baseball-sized hail, crack windshields. Biblical stuff. The
sorrow, it has to go somewhere, I think. Then I comprehend
the punctuation of weather: if this dark-eyed storm is an

exclamation point, then that glowing thunderhead, the one
that stands majestically, resembling the archangel Michael,
replete with a broadsword and thirst for fighting,
that is God’s very own John Hancock.

Michael Biegner has had poems published in Blooms, Poetry Storehouse, Silver Birch Press, Silkworm, WordPeace, and the Poets To Come anthology, in honor of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday.  His prose poem, “When Walt Whitman Was A Little Girl,” was made into a video short by North Carolina filmmaker Jim Haverkamp, where it has competed at various film festivals around the world and is available for viewing on Vimeo. Michael was a finalist in the 2017 Northampton Arts Council Biennial Call To Artists.

A headless ghost,
its nightly visitations,
clanking chains
announcing midnight
and the witches’ hour,
when demons dance
with your daughters.

A ghost without a head.
Quiet as a black cat,
as a snake, as drowned kittens.
Its message obscured by fear,
yours truly trembling
like a hymn, like a flame
being kissed by the wind.
Like a reed stem
in an Assyrian legend.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,400 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press); Like As If (Pski’s Porch); Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

We hear the thunder, the gales,
and we personalize them.
The gods have spoken ..
Storm Freya will make land ..

Two blackbirds larruping song,
from facing hedge and height.
Our rustic Pavarottis,
lyrical, wonderful.

Yet each is holding sway, surely,
marking out his territory?
Is each a property bragger?
Topshop and Trump?

They have built their nests, yes,
raise orange beaks in song
to guard their young. But as far as I know
they have no plans to grow the business.

Note for US readers: the British blackbird, unlike my understanding of the American one, is a hugely popular bird, whose wonderful song delights us from April to June each year.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who lives about 30 miles down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. His poems have been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, where he is a regular in SanPedro River Review, Jerry Jazz Musician and Panoply.

―after Andrew Wyeth’s Study for the Bachelor

Try to see what I see. First,
there must be sunlight.
Not just any sunlight,
but the kind that is only seen
pouring over your shoulder.

And it has to be enough
to dry the cloth, specifically,
the single white shirt
hanging on the line
strung across the porch.

And the shirt must hang
upside-down, fixed there
by three clothespins.
It will appear to be tortured,
those two loose arms

giving in to the loneliness
swept in on an afternoon
breeze. The scrollwork
that frames the porch
speaks a soliloquy

of someone who tastes
the bitterness of time,
who licks the crumbs
from his lips. The wash pan
is the only imperative

waiting below the shirt
to catch its gray shadow
and try to make it as white
as the cuffs and the collar,
the buttonholes and seams.

At the other corner,
a twig of philosophy grows
up behind a leaning board.
No. That’s not right.
A twig of forsythia

just touches the light.
You will not see a shadow
loosed from this greenery.
All of its substance,
all of its meaning stays there

in those leaves. And
is that a cat? Or is it
a black smudge with eyes?
Is it a small universe
with two as yet unnamed stars?

I can’t tell you.
You must determine which of these
drab colors are real,
and which are the flotsam and jetsam
of the life before us.

The weeds must be growing
through the slats of the porch,
and they must go to seed
on their weak stems
in the heat of every summer.

A few loose bits of shade hang down
like ripped fabric from the slats.
They must be there
or the rest of the world
would not make sense

I’m sorry. I mean the world
will never make sense.
I’ve been possessed by a strange solitude.
Look further.
Behind the shirt you will see

a demon hiding
where you would imagine
in the brushstrokes of darkness.
He comes to visit
when you least expect.

Give him room.
Let him breathe
the darkness of the air.
Let him pull on
your clean, white shirt.

David B. Prather studied creative writing at Warren Wilson College.  He studied with Steve Orlen, Agha Shahid Ali, Tony Hoagland, and Joan Aleshire.  His debut collection of poems, We Were Birds, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing.  His work has appeared in several publications, including Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, The American Journal of Poetry, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and many more.