by Glenn Armstrong

The Buddha statue sits serenely beneath a ritually circumcised palm tree. A metal bird sings silently in a cage.

by Glenn Armstrong

Sit in your car in the parking lot and listen to the rain. Recall the time you forgot to turn your wheels to the curb and got a ticket. Get a blood level. Post blood draw pancakes are your reward.

by Christopher Honey

Your shrine, behind the temporary font
And portable organ, is clean and trackless.
On rainy nights, Father Gary wipes the wet
Prints leading to Our Lady. No need here;

by Steven R. Weiner

 from obituaries in The New York Times of people who died from infection with Covid-19

The barber and his scissors died.
What she did was read, & draw, and read some more.
A hummingbird & puppeteer, she flapped her own wings.

by Stephen Reilly

The jasmines thick, plentiful

tonight, the perfumed spirits

of aging matrons from the Fifties,

women of my grandmothers'

generation, women who

by Phocas

And then left to roam and to play on the blank, empty page, what freedom and rapt holy summons rolling, tumbling fields across and thrumming deep inside the ground in the very roots and tendrils of every tree and

by Marda Messick

A handful of white auger shells

plucked from the tide of the tourist beach,

tiny spirals like a sea monster’s baby teeth.

Auguries of a dying ocean.

by Marda Messick

My friend told me the man who was my enemy

has lost his rage along with his words. She’d seen

a video of him, happy, stroking a mechanical cat.

by Remi Recchia

by Gabriella Brand

Use any milk, Holstein heavy, scummy white, or teat-bloated mother’s milk, thin and sudsy as dishwater, with a bluish hue like an old wound. Heat it up.

by E.V. Noechel

How could you? How dare you force my hand

to pull the trigger, then watch this tiny line

of semicolons scatter then freeze forever? It’s not even

by E.V. Noechel

My arms feel so empty.

I stand 12lbs short, a little dog less. I guess

losing just two-thirds of a pound of flesh

per year should be a bargain.

by Mira Martin-Parker

Look, God’s fighting with himself again. All ones and zeros. All lines and circles. Light and shadow, going at it. Look how he flails about. Talking to himself.

by Linda McCullough Moore

We see a rainbow, several actually,

through the spritzing hiss of water

from the bandaged garden hose.

by Remi Recchia

by G.R. Kramer

by Dan MacIsaac

Usnea longissima

whiskery hermit quails & shivers
grizzled miser sips cold mist

by Changming Yuang

Where’s Allen going? Pacific. Today is Wed. My old

Flame is sleeping, waiting to have her GGN removed

From her lungs to stamp out cancer. Poetry. Something

by John C. Mannone

After supper, a bunch of us

had second thoughts about

our friend. He said to trust

him, that we couldn’t come.