welcome come in are you okay sit down make yourself comfortable tell us what happened tell us everything the whole story we will listen carefully harvesting whatever information is of use to us discarding the rest then we will issue our judgement on you on your essence and on your existence we never could tell the difference but anyway please just sit down and relax and give us the fucking information

Irish sunrise
the inevitability
of imputation

Tim Murphy

My sister has been in and out of hospice care. On a chilly December day she says “It’s as cold as death”.
“Can we say it is as hot as death in summer?” I ask.
“Have you ever seen a warm hospital or ER?” she questions me back.

hidden stars
slowly reappear
early dusk

Mona Bedi

enters through double glass doors.
Her body leaning, red crochet crowning her head.
Dangling tubes connect to the green oxygen tank
she’s pulling with her right arm. In her left hand,
an old worn sax case.

Trumpet and bass call to each other, bebop, bebop.
Rhythms fly into the air from JP’s electric guitar.
Fingers swim across the black and whites.

Sitting next to me, she sways
to Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology.”
Then the MC announces:
And now we’ll join Ruby, playing Green Dolphin Street.

Slowly she opens the patinaed clasp
and lifts a worn brass sax; one arm steadies her tank.
The wheels clank-clack up steps onto the stage.

She slips her mouth on the reed. Strong vibrations
build to a crescendo. The room becomes the music.
People tap. Their earlobes dip to the offbeat.

Slinging her sax aside, tubes and tank invisible,
Ruby sings like a yellow-tipped whooper swan
flying.

Norma Bradley

Dear Editor,

The numbers you cite in your post-election article of November 8th tingle my bullshit detector. I understand your passion for the subject about which you expound, but not every reader is as gelatinously swayed as you might have hoped. Your “fuzzy math,” to quote a hero of yours, is just not up to the task of calling into question two centuries of unbroken small “d” democracy. But I realize that fact steps on your sound-bite. “Rigged election,” is a loaded phrase. I suggest you bolster your source material before shooting it off.

Regardlessly,
John Q. Public

Peter Newton

an ancient Norse saga piling up on the photocopier
illustrated with animals that might be extinct already
or maybe just manifestations of the id

charcoal sketches
of my doppelganger
blink once for yes

Melissa Allen

trying to translate from blood to water and back again
as if I hadn’t been living with wolves all these years
yes, I’m in therapy / did you just hear that howl?

better off waiting
for the ice to crack
cocktail moon

Melissa Allen

blacked out halfway through the cracked teacup
next thing I know staring at me from a complete place setting ($49.95)
the whole gang of disciples with fishnets

• bullet points
• in times new roman
• dream journal

Melissa Allen

Peter Newton