Three New Poems by Three New Authors

Fall All Around
by Curtis Tompkins

A weeping cherry blossom's leaves

have made an innocent mess

of the street-side & our townhouse 

lawn no bigger than a decent rug,

as a woman comes limping by 

looking like the jack-o-lantern

on her chest, covering her heart.

She's a grandmother in an orange

sweater sewn to a pumpkin

face a few days before Halloween.

It's an unnatural orange 

that only natural things burn 

through in their dying

like the hundred eye-shaped leaves

out in front of the house and on the sidewalk.

I blow smoke through the window screen

past our tree which outlives the block

of average, nameless saplings 

which the city put up, dead

already, past the high frosted church

steeples, over the town into mountains

where everything leaks wood fire

during these burning months, and this cold

in my head has made my cigarette smell

and taste just the same. I snub it out. 

I'm getting older –– with every sickness

they get harder harder to shake –– every grandmother

in her homemade sweater is growing

closer to the end of my age. 

Prose artist Curtis Tompkins lives and writes in the Allegheny Highlands of western Maryland.  His prose, poetry, and reviews have appeared most recently in Ducts, Prick of the Spindle, The Broadkill Review, Review Revue, Plain Spoke, and Backbone Mountain Review.

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Ballast

by Eric Miller

Saltwater tears flow

over mildewed sponge

memories and barnacle

regrets, but fail to carry

them over the dam in

ropes of cascading water

to a place of lost

remembrances

They stay with me as

excess baggage, serving

as ballast to keep me on

the straight and narrow

course which I try to chart

as I hold my sextant to the

stars

Eric Miller is a retired dentist who has laid down his drill for a quill. His work appears or is forthcoming in many publications, a few of which are Foundling Review, Bartleby-Snopes, Calliope Nerve, Troubadour 21, Short Humor, Writers' Bloc (Rutgers), Poetry Friends, Stories that Lift, and The Storyteller.

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Plain Speech

by Meredith Legg

I could speak plainly
or dress my language in
heavy ugly symbols
like lead shackles
and slackened somethings.

I could speak plainly
when the sun is new
and my skin is hot
and the muggy air
suffocates the pours
and speech dissolves
into heated beads of sweat.

I could flick my hair
to one side, stand on
one foot, stretch,
catch my breath. Heat
immobilizes my body.
Stifling humid yellow.
On this ugly day
I'd just like to stay inside
and speak plainly, I could.

Meredith Legg is a graduate student of Political Science at the University of Central Florida. This is what happens when a poet goes to grad school.

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