An Eavesdropper Walks the Streets by Joe Cushnan

It’s my relationship, nobody’s business and it suits me.

It was a hammer-and-tongs conversation outside a pub,

A young girl with a screeching diva voice that could rattle glass

Talking to a man, red-faced, and trying to get a word in.

A break up, a breakdown, roll credits, the end, wait for outtakes.

Don’t speak to me. Don’t speak to me. Don’t speak to me, rotten git.

She let out a Baskerville hound-howl followed by expletives.

He walked away, raising an arm for a Churchillian V.

I was so sure his middle name was Charles, turns out it’s William.

Two women of years chin-wagging outside a greetings card shop

Talking about a deceased neighbour and how much they’d miss him,

His Walter Brennan musical-chuckle laugh and good manners.

He came round one day and killed two big spiders, one with his boot,

The other with a rolled up People’s Friend which I hadn’t read.

The women hugged and went their separate ways. One shouted back,

His handwriting was perfect. I wish I’d kept all his postcards.

He cut his hand on a salmon tin and the biggest laugh is

He doesn’t eat fish. Outside a bakery, a couple sit,

Eating sausage rolls and talking with their mouths full, crumby lips.

He needed stitches. Took ages because his hand was shaking,

Not fond of blood but he likes them Rambo films and vampire stuff.

Snacks finished, they dispose of the bags and rummage in their coats.

One lights a cigarette, the other sucks on an e-fag, merged

Smoke, a thin fog around them, cancels the smell of bread baking.

---

Joe Cushnan was born and raised in Belfast. Now retired, he devotes as much time as he can to writing. He has a portfolio of published features, reviews, poetry and fiction, and he blogs at www.droppedthemoon.blogspot.com.

Comments

Home by Jessa Forest

Home scratches at her shingles with tree branch fingers, pulls the air conditioning unit close to her grimy aluminum siding, and keens an empty song of mourning. We found her wandering the tornado snarled wild three months ago, starved and lonely. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself, you see? We fed her shards of dining room tables, kindling for the fireplace, and cast iron bathtubs clawed feet first. She was slow to recover so we gutted her plumbing, ripped out her nerves, and rewired the electricity. She let the water in every time it rained so we put a new roof on her and let her out for regular walks around the wolf pen. Let her mingle with the vultures, I said, let her feel useful and clean up the dead but no one wanted to listen. We found rot an mold in her corners, infused her insulation with antibiotics, and quarantined her for two weeks while she belched ladderback chairs, sofa cushions, wind chimes, and broken bookcases. She still has her bad days. After feeding time

“Are You So Tired Then, Stranger?” by Ace Boggess

—Dick Allen, “B&B” Wind exhausts with its icy fists. Knives of rain wear me down, & leaves in their helicopter swirls like leaflets dropped from a plane. October depletes me, & November. They’ve too much busyness. They send me spinning, dancing, lonely with the rake, the broom. I surrender, collapsing like an old barn, debris of me piling in a chair with clear view of the television. News is on. It spends me. Talk of politics, also. I’d like to shut up the voices that fatigue. They hum like a B-flat in the pipes. They bicker & scold, condemn. They expend me like carrying groceries up a flight of stairs until I’m too drained to care which side they’re on. --- Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So , and The Prisoners . His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-c

Examples Of Resilience by Jen Feroze

Look to the city’s forests. Those monoliths and museums, cathedrals and palaces and theatres whose stories have sunk deep under the pavements, have rooted themselves in the silt at the bottom of the river. Think of the architects spreading sketches across tired wood, holding up samples of mosaic tile, wondering what sort of mark they’ll leave. Think of the tongues of flame, the sirens, the silence before the shells fall. Think of the thousands and thousands of feet that have walked here. The myriad secrets whispered across the vast blue dome, where the apostles keep them safe. Think of the nightingale you heard here that night in November, wrapping its song around St Paul’s in ribbons of winter. Tiny in the face of all that history. Dauntless, nonetheless. --- Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small sleep thieves. Her work has recently appeared in Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Ekphrastic Review and The Madrigal, among others. Her first collection, The C

Dear Reader

Search This Blog