by Kathleen McCann

The old garage has not seen paint in years.
Seasons that wandered through its wormy wood,

taken by the trellis of time.
Is this after all,

what it is that
we must let go,

be it wood,
or flesh?

Relic of touch,
felt presence.

Lilacs in May,
deliciously brief.

by Claire Scott

Thin as a communion wafer she prays to the saints
Saint Eleanor of the Wispy Waist
Saint Martin of the Iron Will

she endures the siege of long afternoons
with a single glass of skim milk
listless evenings of thin apple slices

draconian rules, a deviant liturgy
calories counted like rosary beads
on a necklace of shame

she is her own punishment

only tenuous ties
to a stalled world where anything can happen
because it already has

pale images float above like Luna moths

cracks in the ceiling
the rumble of traffic
the smell of English Leather

her neighbor’s hands groping, insistent
tugging at her nightgown
don’t tell

barely teeth and bones
fading like a cat’s last grin
triumphant

by Cuthbert Pierry

A poem walks into a bar,
sits down and starts doing shots —

Rot–gut warrior stuff: Four Roses,
Corby’s rye parrot, with muscatel chasers.

The bartender ambles over to the poem
“Why so glum, chum?” he asks.

“Because I suck!” the poem slurred
“I could use a twist!”

“Well, here you go,” replied the tapster extending
a lemon wedge poised for a squeeze.

“Not that kind of twist, you puffy cretin cullion,
A Twist! A Turn! The kind you don’t see

coming, the kind that transports an oaf like
you to a place you never expected to be.

“Like this one?” the bartender retorted, summarily
hurling the supple lush lyric to the alley.

“Well, not exactly” the poem stammered in a daze
as a belching backhoe Hog, coming along the cans,

scooped it up, chapter and verse,
the wretched rune wretching iambs

from the high lift bucket

wondering how it would ever
scrabble its way out of this one.

by Daniel Lance Patrick

It was a healthy poor, the kind that feeds
parts other than the gut.
He would lie behind the garage amongst
the June bugs and the pricker weeds,
where the old peach tree once stood,
the one that gave his Mother more
than she could bake in all those pies,
and listen to the train’s dark rhythm
hymn of wheels over steel where
one rail meets the next played
like a drummer from the industrial
past, the Erie–Lackawanna line
clanking so close to his head
though it was almost a mile away.
The upstate overnight summer air
lifted and carried that train song
across the field behind his house
vibrating the ground he would sleep on.
Whatever happened to the lady
that raised the goats in Gastown? Or was it Milstream?
He didn’t know that part of town so well,
but he knew from that way the trains came.
He’d ride his bike out there sometimes,
and felt like he was on the other side of the country.
Whatever happened to the water tower,
and the trails behind it where they found
that dead girl? He used to ride there too,
come home covered in dust and jump
in the canal down at the end of the road.
The neighborhood crazy lady
said he was so skinny she
couldn’t stand to look at him.
Then she would strut past his yard,
bare foot, watching her own tits bounce
while smoking cigarettes in a tee shirt and dirty cutoffs.
He used to hear some wild sounds coming from that house
drinking sounds. And then the train would come
and its long song would drum away the drunks,
at least for a short while. He wondered how long
those trains were that gave him such a reprieve
and allowed him to dream
of faraway places that only the headlight
of a train sees.