January 2025 | poetry
I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our
living room like uninvited guests at a party
waiting with my wife in case her heart attack
arrives before the ambulance does, each man
scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might
burst from a bookcase, can’t unsee them monitoring
the way she probes her neck and shoulder and jaw
for a sign of the fuses a coronary lights in a woman’s
body, the young one unpacking the defibrillator,
flattening the blue patches that attach to the chest.
How strange that pain has a photographic memory.
Unbidden image imbued with new life. The past
always hijacking the present, my wife ever lifted
into the ambulance, the door closing between us.
Ken Hines
Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that take getting through to people who may not be listening. His poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, and Dunes Review, among others. You’ll find his essays in The Millions, Philosophy Now, and Barrelhouse. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife Fran.
January 2025 | poetry
I’ve rehearsed this in my mind
countless times–
Put the broom or cardboard scrap
on far side of carcass
Place scoop– something thin and stiff
yet flexible, at near edge
Draw broom towards scoop–
towards myself
This is where the problem lies–
no matter what tool
I feel the soft roll of death-filled body
limp foot flop, rotation of tail
through glove, through broom and dustpan
into my veins, my whole being
I can’t do this
I fear my wrist might twitch the pan
popcorn creature into air
Once our cat left a field mouse
in the dining room midday
I ran through scenarios for hours
gathered gloves, small paper bag, old broom
but ended up hiding it beneath empty box
until my husband returned from work
to do the deed
Yet when he died
I took his lifeless hand directly into mine,
said goodbye, released
golden halo from finger, stayed
with him as he cooled
Joy Kreves
Joy Kreves is a visual artist/poet with an M.S. in Painting and a B.S. in art education from Illinois State University. She has often incorporated poems into or exhibited them alongside her artworks. Since 2021, she has been a DVP/US1 Poets member and is the current managing editor of the “US1 Worksheets” anthology. Her poems have appeared in several exhibition catalogs and “US1 Worksheets”. She has had poems published in NewVerseNews in 2024. In 2022, she had a poem at the Poetry show at Trenton Social. Kreves has hosted several “Artist Melts” events incorporating art and poetry at Suburban Frontier, her Ewing, NJ, art space.
January 2025 | poetry
it is human nature to want to build something
substantial and wonder why our bridges fall
like fever. upon conversion from spruce to roof,
the eastern hemlock remains square-shouldered
unhungry for sun. a hospital falls in the forest
and everyone can hear it, but you wouldn’t know.
the frame of my first home, a place to dream
walls onto bones; in the backyard: three pine trees
as surrogate mothers searching for their children
searching for their limbs. books of aftermath
on classroom shelves full of featureless figures
drumlined over rockets, ships, blimps, then me,
reluctant survivor stretching fingers across
the gray victims, too young to picture their faces
too safe to see the size of their crowd. learning
eventually every echo goes unanswered
somewhere in the world. the day we move i bury
the woody wedge of a pinecone beside the porch
since i believe everyone’s intent is to be good,
unaware mulch and soil boast different creators
unaware the sun can’t reach the seeds still at home
in their husk, unaware that no amount of protection
will ever grow into a stalwart tree that refuses
to abandon its spire and survive the winter alone.
Amanda Nicole Corbin
Amanda Nicole Corbin is an Ohio-based poet who has had her work published in The London Magazine, Door is a Jar, Pile Press, Gone Lawn, the Notre Dame Review, and more. Her debut full-length collection, addiction is a sweet dark room, (Another New Calligraphy, 2024) focuses largely on her journey and struggles with mental health and addiction. Find her on Threads and Instagram at @ancpoet or www.amandanicolecorbin.com.
January 2025 | poetry
There were orchards here once
and creeks that ran all the way to July.
In those days, we could cross one on foot
and up the embankment on the other side,
just below the walnut grove, long gone,
as well as deer who lay in the tall grass
and flew at our scent.
We walked then on land
not usually used for grazing,
the windy side of a knoll,
where fog settled into folds and stayed
under the spreading of an oak or laurel.
In outcroppings of granite, slid
between hard shapes
and stood in the silence,
pondering the unspoken questions, listening
for their stony answers.
Jerome Gagnon
Jerome Gagnon is the author of the recent collection Refuge for Cranes: Praise Poems from the Anthropocene and Rumors of Wisdom. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Spiritus, Poet Lore, and Modern Haiku. A former teacher and tutor, he lives in California in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.jeromegagnonblog.wordpress.com
January 2025 | poetry
(an early Halloween)
Mildred has a gash on her forehead where
the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone.
Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left
foot from a small maple-oak across the way.
The rail fence is shattered where the van
with thirty-two immigrants went through it
and they got over the earth in a hurry, never
coming back. Above, the blue moon not
the slightest color of blue is more brilliant
than a neon planet made of platinum, brighter
than anything I’ve ever seen on an August night.
Which reminds me, once at 1:30 in the morning
when I was seventeen at Mt. Gretna, out in
the middle of the woods, near a picnic area
drinking stolen beer with other/college kids:
ghostly through the trees…
and a lone, rich baritone voice from Broadway
sang a love song to his lady for the night…
(he’d been Li’l Abner, they said)
no music, the most beautifully romantic thing
I’ve ever heard — fifty years later in jail
thinking about it. In the meantime, they put
my bed on the porch roof to be funny… oh, it’s nice
to be the butt of jokes, and the one everyone
hates… seems like, as if to have been born was
to wear some kind of putrid curse around your
face like a necktie for people to piss on, that’s
what it is to be bullied from six to seventeen—
when it stopped, and I pulled the trigger of the
shotgun 14 times where they sat.
[true incident in pieces, but I never shot anybody;
no matter how much I might’ve sometimes wanted to]
Richard Atwood
Born in Baltimore, Rick has lived in Denver and Los Angeles, currently in Wichita, Kansas. He has published three books of poetry, and been published in several literary journals: Karamu, Oberon, Avalon Literary Review, Mochila Review, borrowed solace, Penumbra, ArLiJo, The Raven’s Perch, and Iconoclast among others. He has also authored 3 screenplays, 2 large stage plays; plus an m/m erotic-romantic fantasy, with a GOT ambiance… no supernatural jazz, and a strong moral thread woven throughout (Chronicles of the Mighty and the Fallen, under the name of Richard McHenry).
January 2025 | poetry
I get asked to be on a podcast
and he’s never read any of my poems, ever,
doesn’t even know my name, asks me, “So,
what’s your name?” as if this is a thoughtful
question, and I wonder how much research
he’d have had to do to find out my name,
especially when we’ve already exchanged
multiple emails, and he says, “So, what are
you? A poet? A fiction writer?” And I
realize he’s going to ask me my height next
and weight after that and maybe we’ll get
into sports and weather in a bit, and I realize
how much I ache to have a person who just
simply sees me, how I was just on an elevator
yesterday with two people, one on my left
and one on my right, and how they talked
through me, as if I am a ghost, and I get
ready for the podcast host to ask me if I’m
a phantom and I get myself ready to say,
“I don’t know. I might be. I feel like
I’m fading.” And I remember seeing
an interview with Norm Macdonald
when it was nearing the end of his life
and no one knew it was nearing the end
of his life, except him and a few other
very select people, and it feels like that
for me, like I’m near the end, and when
I write, sometimes I think, “Is this my last
poem?” And I remember talking to Donald
Hall, who was always so kind to me, and him
telling me that he was too tired to write poetry
anymore, that he could write non-fiction, but
that poetry just took everything out of him,
the exhaustion, how he felt tired just telling me
this, how you could hear the enthusiasm lessening
in his voice, how frightened I was to get the sense
that someone was leaving before they were leaving
and, thank God, his words have stayed . . .
A friend asked me what kind of a poet I am and I said,
“a horror poet” and he asked what that means and
I showed him the statistics of murders in Detroit and
I showed him that we have a murder every day and
I took him in my car and we drove one block and
I pointed and said they murdered him for his watch.
Who? I told him who they murdered and about his
watch and we drove and we were in front of a restaurant
and I told him about the bodies and in the last three days
we’ve had shootings on Minden Ave and on Jefferson Ave
and on Moross Rd and on Joy Rd and on Biltmore Rd
and I think of joy and not-joy, of how we keep mastering
anger, how online’s a storm, how I’ve seen footprints made
from blood, how I looked down after the riot near
my home and the footprints led to a tree and I looked
up, expecting to see someone up there, but it was empty,
and my mother used to be a therapist and she told me,
“The more symptomatic someone is, the more severe
the depression or the anxiety, the more guns they own.”
She said she could tell someone’s mental health by
the amount of guns in the home, that the people
who were the most unstable would have ten, twenty,
thirty, more guns. That it was like the guns were this
screaming of how they needed help. That their houses
were made of guns. Gun-walled. We drove by abandoned
homes and I’d think of abandoned people. And my
mother said angels are anyone in this life who makes
people hurt less. She said that we get a rush in our blood
when we hurt people, but that it is the evil of everything.
She said that the calm comes when you try to protect
the hurt. She said this while smoking. She smoked like
a chimney in a house that was on fire. She’d get mid-
night calls from people who were suicidal and I remember
hearing her whispering in the other room when I was little.
I remember asking her, “What is suicide?” and it was near
Christmas and the lights were blinking behind her and she
started crying, not saying anything, just bawling, and I was
so little that I thought that was her response. I thought that
the answer to “What is suicide?” is a brutality of tears.
And maybe that is the only true response. I wish I could
paint it for you, the pain, how beautiful those lights were,
the music on softly in the background, something promising.
Ron Riekki
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Holy Fuck’s “Lovely Allen.”
