Timothy L. Rodriguez

July 2025 | poetry

Hee Haw

We walk where the blade talks

high wire of a divide

between schemes of dreams

and the certain verdict

in the capital trial called living

All walks punish with wishes

We wander dead ground

a travail through felled

trees of knowledge

The hee in the irony

of haw is we knew

all sides of the effects

but still stayed the course

Profits issue the orders

to disavow how this foul

and noxious handiwork

can level if not erase

our collective sense.

On the shoulders of hubris

we stand arms akimbo

assuring our final resting

place is disgrace

We think we’re invincible

too important to fail

too big to flail in our own stink

incapable of falling into oblivion

Until the fall we dismiss the mephitis

Telling ourselves it’s odorless

the perfect deflect to hasten

the end of our kind

joyously singing in acid rain

Timothy L. Rodriguez

Timothy L. Rodriguez has published in English and Spanish. Warren Publishing of Charlotte, NC, recently introduced his latest novel—Never is Now. His fiction and poems have appeared in over two dozen national and international publications, including Main Street Rag, Another Chicago Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal (2017 Pushcart nomination), The Raven’s Perch, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Joseph Landi

July 2025 | poetry

Bodies

We found them rolled together in a sack,

soaked by runoff at the bottom of a grass embankment.

Tossed from a car, no doubt. We peeled them apart

and laid them on a bare log in a skinny roadside copse

to dry. We were nine with little idea of what we beheld;

their pictured parts pierced by familiar appendages made

alien by size. Our mouths gaped like theirs as we stared.

We hid them in the hollow of a rotting stump

and went home to wonder at sisters and neighborhood

girls. All summer, we returned to our moldering hoard

to ogle and ahh and, later, laugh at and fight over

favorites. We were learning like any beasts.

Joseph Landi

Joseph Landi is a medical writer living in New York City. His poems have appeared in North American Review (NAR), The Southern Review, South Carolina Review, Midwest Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. His work is also featured in the textbook “Elements of Creative Writing” published by NAR and the University of Northern Iowa.