By: Madhalasa Iyer penny wise, pound foolish A penny somersaults,crash-dives over its head,and lands flat on my palm. Heads: remember.Tails: forget. Lincoln stares at me.Four days and Four years ago.remember.the penny decides my fate,and my palm secures it. ### penny…
By: Robert Lesher Last Day1You would talkAnd breathe out.I would breathe in,Let my wordsFall intoMy stomachAs both of usListenedTo the rain outside. On such daysThe cats cuddledOn the crochet rugIn front of the stove,And the recordsOn the turntablePlayedUp the hallFrom…
By: Mohammad Jashim Uddin Most Westerners judge the Prophet Muhammad through the prism of Islamic extremism. After all, someone who inspires such rabid fundamentalism must have himself been a wild-eyed zealot. But the truth is, at least as told by…
By: Ray Cicetti Goldfinch On the Audubon trailI saw the goldfinch, dead,his black winged body broken neara thicket of thistle and sparse grass.The olive brown female abovecalled out, to distract me.And I remembered another Julywhen I got the call about…
By: Harvey Huddleston English came easily to Roman, as had the language of every country he’d lived in. Moving in his youth from one country of the Russian Steppes to the next, he’d picked up the Tajik, Uzbeki and Kazak,…
By: Roliena Slingerland “Can you come home for a bit?” Mother’s voice crackles on the other end of the phone. “I can’t.” The quickness of her lie startles even Gretta. Coming home is not the first choice these days. She…
By: Eric Burbridge Is that an ATM envelope on the curb? Lamar pushed his empty shopping cart quickly towards the Citibank ATM center outside Kroger. The closer he got, the harder his heart pounded. Could he be so lucky?…
By: Gulshan Ara Honoring all the refugees around the world who are trying to escape man made terror, devastation, and starvation as the families divided & lost; In America, parents of children separated at border in Mexico under Donald Trump…
By: S.A. Red There was a house behind the hillThey say it was hauntedBy human beingsThey were alive unlike the childThe mother of two killedShe didn’t need to hideBecause no one knewWhat happened that nightI didn’t need a body to…
By: Richard LeDue Blunt Trauma The poems have gonequiet,like breathless swearingthat only exists in your headafter dropping a couch on your toe,but you still clear space in your living roombecause what are Saturday afternoons for?Finding crumbs everyone forgot about,only to…