by Mark Parsons

We started with communal living, drugs. Then got involved in real estate
scams, extortion, blackmailing a restaurant owner for brooking his business partner,
a pederast that liked to use the restaurant to cruise teenage boys working their first jobs.
                                     There was the guy who serviced the a.c.;
he flew a single engine airplane down to Florida,
returned with cocaine on the weekends.
We stepped on all of them. The prospect of a violent death
along a lonely stretch of country road
didn’t faze me.
                       For this
the Main Asshole Nerve–center MAN valued me.
I grew accustomed to the vagaries of loyalty
to this man who knew no purpose
beyond an insatiable craving for doubt and suspicion,
his appetite sharpened
by a vague self–denial he saw in me,
an abstracted severity
he put down to some hypoglycemia.
                                                         When I departed he gave me
     a half pound.
Years later I dead–ended and asked back
into the fold sulked and bristled,
was principled and morally composed,
yes, conflicted, even,
for the first time
in an otherwise dissolute
and depraved life,
having attained in the interim
with money or power or menace.
I believed I could mend,
knit the ragged ends of my soul.
                                                  I didn’t understand
the stumps were cauterized
flush with the sundering
of my black heart
a kind and decent woman passing through my life
left in her wake, her departure already assured in her first visitation (could it have been any different?)
I realized after she had staked a claim to everything
I ever thought I owned.

by George Repp

It’s not about originality
as much as it is borrowing paints
to generate a message
that targets the reader
to feel
and feel deeply;
to create a resonance
a vibration
in the center
of their own experiencing
so to support
their personal responsive chord
and evoke
the singing forward
as a new leaf
inhabits the branch of a tree
toward the end goal
of turning every leaf
to attend her.

by Molly M. Caldwell

Spence Hot Spring
     Jemez River, NM

TripAdvisor said
be careful not to swallow
Janis Joplin’s pubic hairs, and
mind the amoebas. Fumbling
up icy boulders, were his glossy shoulders
rising from the pool,
Billy, from Nevada City
eyes as friendly as a cows’
tucked his penis between his legs
and offered me
chocolate, our shoulders bronzed
in December sun. You
can close your eyes, he said
my dog, Skillet Dog
will watch for cougars.

by Molly M. Caldwell

You sleep most of the way
like you do most of the time.
From Ellsworth to Machias
I drink cold coffee
from a handmade mug
wedged between my thighs imagining
what kind of person I would have to become
to hold your eyes open
with anything less than duct tape
or my tits, pushed up
near my mouth
where I’d lick them myself
if you asked me.

At the Irving
you miss an opportunity
for those cherry pies. I refuel
on the compliments of a fisherman
& dig mixed CDs from a crevice
in the backseat.

When we reach the trailhead
I wake you like your mother might,
arriving at grandmother’s
for chit–chat & lemonade.

Through the woods
the path is flat, you tell me a joke
about a man who fucks sheep.
Light grows between gaps in the trees
exposing jagged cliffs
at the edge of the Atlantic.

I catch my toes
on living roots
staring at Grand Manan
& pairs of seagulls, spilling
like wasted raindrops
from the clouds.
You watch your feet
the whole way to our campsite
stepping on milky quartz & pink feldspar
rising from the mud.

We are walking
through hemlock & pine
the morning after
when you pause to ask me
Don’t you ever want to get out
of Maine? Gliding over cities
of mosses & mushrooms
I want to ask you
who funded your hash dreams
the year you chose to sleep
in hammocks hung from ceilings
in Jerusalem & Rome.

Headed west on Route 1
my rusted stationwagon
stumbles through silence
exhaust chokes up hills
lined with homes grown into the landscape —
a white cape, swallowed
by uncut grass.