Across from the widow hunched
By a hundred plus years
Hang two photographic portraits
Her breakfast companions

A full-color, middle-aged man
Smiles through a beard
Chin in his hand
Open to all that’s outside him.

A black-and-white, elderly man
Gestures as he lectures
Perched on a desk
Eyes on the floor of his classroom

She rolls her wrist

“My husband averts his gaze
He had many girlfriends
My son smiles at me
So I look at him
I wish he had been my husband.”

She points to a spot between her eyebrows
“It’s drying up in here.
There’s no blood flow.”

She buries her head in her hands
“It’s a terrible feeling
When the connection snaps.”

Behind her is a poster of a Viennese synagogue

“I stood apart from the crowd
Who chanted to torch it
My husband dragged
Inside with the others.
It was the only one the
Nazis didn’t burn
It had too many important
Buildings around it.”

She grins and I see
What remains of her teeth
She turns and I see
The kindness in her eyes

“You have a Du relationship with God,
Not a Sie.
You are certain of God.
I am certain that I’m not certain.”

She draws her thumb from
One side of her forehead to the other.
“It’s getting empty in here
The connection is lost.”

Currently, Laura Felleman is an accountant at the University of Iowa.  Before that, she was a seminary professor. Prior to that, she was a pastor.  She moved to Iowa City with her husband in 2016 and started writing poetry soon afterwards.  In order to learn this new craft, Laura attends the Free Generative Writing Workshops and participates in local poetry readings.

My father took off in the middle of the night,
with him at the wheel. Rumor has it he had
another long fight with my mother on the subject
of commitment.

The day my father left was very strange. I
went into the bedroom; there he left behind his brown
wallet and a wrist watch that I found on
top of the bedroom dresser.

I should like to call to your attention
to his wallet: battered, faded, and old, it smelled
of long days and warm beer. I opened it and found
a few George Washingtons creased together and a
picture of a naked woman that wasn’t my mother;
the watch was busted, rusty, and useless. One
hand was lost, the other never moved.

I dropped the watch into the garbage pail;
the wallet I kept and used until it fell
apart of old age.

Now it’s only me that feels strange and
left behind. My feelings for him are like a
bowl of fish hooks: I take one out, and they all come.

Tim Tipton was first seduced by the craft of poetry when he read “The Panther” by Rainer Marie Rilke.  Today marks 20  years since he joined the Ventura County poetry circuit. Tim has written poetry that has been featured in ART/LIFE, Askew, The San Gabriel Quarterly, Poetic Diversity, LUMMOX, as well as other journals too many too mention. Tim is a graduate of California State University of Northridge where he received a Bachelor of Science in Sociology. He also received a degree in Substance Abuse counseling.

Coating the soles
of my feet,
is the soil
I will be buried in.

It comforts me,
knowing it is there,
its grains and lumps,
its damp warmth.

It comforts me, too,
knowing everyone has some
touching the soles
of their feet, present
since birth, though
they are too busy
to feel its touch, its permanence,
too busy moving
so they might live,
too busy living
so they never stop,

never stop
and feel
the soil on their soles,
and the gentle comfort it brings,
the surety of what comes
no matter the steps taken.

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England, and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll.  His debut poetry collection Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge was published in 2010. He is currently working towards a second collection. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com.

We are in the subway. New York’s subway
is heaven for wanderers, these walls are
the skies with transparent clouds between
us and the trains are our kingdoms. The silence
around us is so touchable we can feel it with
our breath. We are asking the silence now:
“Tell us the truth, where is the exit, where is
the belief, is the belief an exit?” We see
faces and we hear words around us: “The
searching for an answer as to what will result
from an internal increase or erosion of beliefs,
the act of moving forward and not looking back
is like writing a verse – an act of faith,” We are
in the subway and we can feel the starry sky above
and no moral law within a sound, but within silence.

David Dephy is a trilingual Georgian/American poet, novelist, essayist, performer, multimedia artist and painter. He is an active participant in the American and international poetry and artistic scenes such as PEN World Voices, 92Y Poetry Center, Voices of Poetry, Long Island Poetry Listings, New York Public Library, Starr Bar Poetry Series, Columbia University – School of the Arts in the City of New York, and Bowery Poetry Club, which named him a Literature Luminary. His poetry has been published in the USA and all over the world. He lives and works in New York City.

Grandpa’s hands
were kind, old, tan from the hot sun
They told more than his face did about life
and where he had traveled in his eighty years.
His hands were masterful in finding lost gems,
making fishing lures and carving something
out of wood to last forever.
His hands always open, never closed.
I grew up wanting to have those hands
Touching earth, arranging space
I found it natural when his hand held mine.

Tim Tipton was first seduced by the craft of poetry when he read “The Panther” by Rainer Marie Rilke.  Today marks 20  years since he joined the Ventura County poetry circuit. Tim has written poetry that has been featured in ART/LIFE, Askew, The San Gabriel Quarterly, Poetic Diversity, LUMMOX, as well as other journals too many too mention. Tim is a graduate of California State University of Northridge where he received a Bachelor of Science in Sociology. He also received a degree in Substance Abuse counseling.

Newly together, coasting open road,
they parked the van, looked down from the hill
upon a village harbour, spruce with its boats
being taken out, repainted for the season.

They watched the boatmen, perceiving them
as bearded men in navy blue, returning now
to the open seas of quest and exhilaration.
They loved those men and their salty journeys.

(Griffiths, who’d originally grown that beard
because of shaving rash, had a headache that day,
but still, it was going into April now
and he was back in his Amethyst, a happy man).

Later, the van’s prow nosed back to the camp site,
passing the hedges’ promise and primroses.

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.