The man on the other line calls me doll
speaks in exclamations: don’t do it
you crazy fool! Someone loves you out there!
I’ve spilled a beer on my lap
and sit in wet jeans with a blanket
at my feet. Outside it’s like I always
imagined it would be – a dark and dreamy
fog arranged delicately over the yard
like I’m in my own Lifetime movie,
beer cans scattered over my coffee table.
Sometimes I have all the fight
in the world, I think, but don’t say
because all I really want
is for this man to call me doll
so I can imagine his voice
coming out of a soft boy mouth.
Mostly, he just says he understands
and I ask him if he knows what it’s like
to drink two-day old coffee over lipstick stains,
to drag a road-sign with your mother’s
maiden name out of the ground, only to leave it
on your front porch in the rain,
if he knows what gravel feels like
stuck in your palms.
I can hear paper shuffling,
phones ringing – he’s very busy,
I realize, and I’m very drunk
and I don’t even sound like I’m in danger.
Sometimes, I tell him, I just want
to get drunk alone and watch Braveheart
but tonight I just want to hear
someone say my name
and sound like they know
who I am

Mary Stone is the author of the poetry collections One Last Cigarette and Mythology of Touch. Her chapbook, The Dopamine Letters, was published in 2014 by Hyacinth Girl Press. She currently lives and teaches in St. Joseph, MO, where she co-edits Stone Highway Review, serves as a poetry editor for Sundress Publications, and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic Reading Series.

you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you
—Billy Collins, “Japan”

There are days I have been cast
(down) in bronze.
Gloom pervades me like patina.
I am the bells of Mary-le-Bow, long (fallen) silent,
mute, tongueless, hollowed out.

The claws of my dead dog clatter on the floor.
Even when I turn into the sunlight,
my shadow stretches in front of me,
and I can only step into the darkness.

Elizabeth Yalkut is a writer in New York City, who graduated from Emma Willard School and Barnard College, Columbia University. Her poetry has been nominated for the 2014 Best of the Net Award and has most recently appeared in Spry Literary Journal and East Jasmine Review. She can be found on the web at elizabethyalkut.com.

This is a photograph of your hands scooping water out of the river named lonely running through
the center of your grandmother’s chest. This is a photograph of your knees bent at the altar
painted with the years between you & the last time you saw your father cry. This is a photograph
of the look in your eyes when your blood stopped for that fraction of a second just before impact.
This is a photograph of your skin crawling on its belly to the ocean of your blue-blue tension.
This is a photograph of your mouth full of sand. This is a photograph of your mother forever
trying to floss out the spaces between your teeth. This is a photograph of the shadow shaped by
the tower of secrets sleeping behind your ear. This is a photograph of you leaning in to kiss the
collage of lips that the secrets came from. This is a photograph of your neck missing the feeling
of a breath no longer there. This is a photograph of the back of your head holding all that you that
you’ve ever known up until now.

Amanda Oaks is the founding editor of Words Dance Publishing. Her works have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Stirring and Dressing Room Poetry Journal. She is the author of two poetry collections, Hurricane Mouth (NightBallet Press 2014) and I Eat Crow, a co-authored split book centered around living in the Appalachian region of Western Pennsylvania (Words Dance 2014). She is currently working on a collection of poems called, Raised on Pop Songs. Visit her website at amandaoaks.com.

Running from Virginia to the other shore
you’re halfway there in Topeka or thereabouts
which is where you stay and serve coffee
in an Edward Hopper truck stop
where it’s always dusk and the interstate
rolls flat out parallel to the sky
straight as a chalked line snapped against a wall
no curves or hills or valleys or stop signs
to slow your progress toward that other shore
should you decide to leave the warm circle of light
that holds you and the coffee and the truck drivers
who smell of work and loneliness and greasy burgers

And let’s say you’re wearing a yellow
dress the color of Kansas corn
and your hair tassels down your back
and you fall in love with every single truck driver
who asks for apple pie because this is America
by God and the apple pie smells like freedom
and the coffee tastes like every dream you ever
had even the ones that turned to ashes
because this is America where dreams
are the slippery currency of existence and
we all know where existence leads in the end

And let’s say you’re imagining that other shore
with its palm trees and drive-ins and suspect blondness
and you spill the coffee and damned if it doesn’t
puddle neatly into the shape of California
which is where America always wants to run
but you with your Kansas-yellow dress
you only managed to escape as far as Topeka
so you tie your apron snug around your waist
and mop up the coffee and cut another slice of pie

Sally Zakariya’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently Boston Literary Magazine, Emerge, Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, Theodate, and Southern Women’s Review. Her poetry has won prizes from Poetry Virginia and the Virginia Writers Club. Sally has designed and self-published illustrated alphabet books on food, literature, and anatomy. She has published two chapbooks, Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011) and blogs at http://www.ButDoesItRhyme.com.

What are they that move
Through these rooms without even
The encumbrance of shadows?
—Tracy K. Smith

In a land so sharply lit
Of such vast emptiness     dry scrubbed
Of rock ocotillo and arroyos
Framed by mountains canyoned
Toothed and mesa flat     a sky
That won’t release one’s gaze
The blues of it with broods of marbled cumuli
Veined grey and blue     the sky
Its clouds receding to horizons
The bottom mete the mountains
Always mountains

In this land cast shadows jar one’s vision
Vultures’ moving shrouds sweep mesas
Juniper and pine     ebb and flow
On canyon walls     a butterfly’s dark splash
Across the rock the scrub the sandy soil

Shadow’s other side comes traveling
In the midst of this sharp clarity     dust whirling
Devils out on cattle range in suddenness
Become a gusting gale where all is dun
No shadow no horizon     a day of this

The curtain lifts     again
The boundlessness of earth and sky
Toy freights traversing the desert vastness
Toyed with by the mountains’ masses
Yet seductive and hypnotic     engines barred
Burnt orange gold and black
Underscore the ground of bistre coffees duns
The hybrid power’s push and pull of miles
Of rolling stock     Gallup     the dark twilight’s

Wounded reds its pumpkin oranges
Its yellows     now hairbreadth streaks
Below the brush wash up to midnight blue
A silvered nick of moon
The engines and their stock
A rolling shade

While blink between these silhouettes
Of cars of coal and double stacks
The city lights on 66 the spark of tracks

The vultures roost the butterflies
The devil dust the rolling stock
The Mother Road     the hour blue

From sorrows     or from dreams
From fear     or from our open hearts
From shadows lost     or blue
From shadows found

Peter Seidman was born in Chicago (K through 4th grade, he went to school next to Wrigley Field, hence the Cubs cap—once a Cubs fan always a Cubs fan). He was educated in the Heartland as well as on both coasts. Peter retired several years ago from life as a teacher, R&D program manager, and editor. He gardens, swims, hikes, and regards his writing as a Practice. He has been published, among other sources, in Gertrude 13, River Poets Journal, and Presence, as well as in the anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. He lives in Berkeley, California.