“Famous Last Words,” by Paul Giles

SHIRT: “The first hanging is also the last.”

BED: “Tiredness: the little death.”

PILLOW: “Once bitten, twice shy.”

“Daydreaming in Greensburg,” by Matt Henderson

I’m gonna shake these suburban
Small-town white-person blues
And travel to the most flamboyant gay bar imaginable

“Mack,” by Autumn Hayes

Forget your diet. We both know why you came here.
You ogle my browned buns,
my prime-beefcake physique,
and you cannot stay away
because I’m built

“Orlando Bloom in Morning,” by Evan Allgood

Light spills into the hotel room
like ill-prepared lemonade from
the sky’s 5-cent stand, the one
all the hung-over grown-ups
have been trying to avoid.

Orlando blinks

Two Poems by David W. Landrum

It is here you’ll stay.
I have to donate you—
and don’t lay blame: you were the one
who became a relic, galumphed
into the dismal swamp of old desire.
You are a specimen, so don’t insist
you aren’t exotic.

Two Poems by Steve De France

Sitting in her garden
I resolve to reflect a positive life outlook.
I begin a spiritually affirming list poem.
I like fish swimming in a pond.
Birds are good—they sing a bit.
Ducks are decorative but dumb.

Two Poems by Danny Adams

Othello (Moor), Iago (scorned)
go at it in a Turkish war
but poor Othello doesn’t know
Iago’s out to get him so

“Downy Nights,” by Laura Garrison

The dreams
webbed and flapping, with beaks like orange shoehorns,
suffuse my head;

“The Paper Mite,” by Casey FitzSimons

No friend to authors, the paper mite, devouring libraries with librarians in sight. I’ll squish any with my thumbnail that trample on my words and lest he be remembered, on a period, obscured. ———— Casey FitzSimons is an over-educated, under-published artist and writer. Her father was a Milton scholar and she has yet to walk [...]

Four Poems by Mark Cunningham

[specimen] I couldn’t read my intervention on how hegemonic ideology physically changes the way people see the world until I put on my new glasses with the thick black ear pieces that are all the rage now. I started to see things as if I were a point-of-view shot in a movie, so I knew [...]