A Toast to My Son’s Last Drink

November 20, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodd Whelpley

His mom and I are slow to form attachments.
(We have met your kind before—juniper
on pulse points, malt-conditioned hair.) But if
you are his last last drink, then welcome
to the family.
We’ll receive your gifts
beneath the tree, set white meat on your plate.
There will be no politics at dinner, and
I’ll fight to forget you as the Danube—
a frothy current pushing those swan-boat
kill-me pills across his lips, which landed,
by grace, hapless,
like a drift of cygnets
tickling his gut. If you swear you are
his last last drink, then I will pay a cantor
and a priest. Father you, as I have failed
to father him. Take you at the elbow.
wedding march you as my dire daughter,
and let him lift the veil.

Ichetucknee

June 1, 2025.Reading time 5 minutes.

By J.D. McGee

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013-2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

Archaeological exploration has discovered the site of a 17th century Spanish mission, San Martin de Timucua, next to a short tributary connecting Fig Springs to the Ichetucknee River.
Florida Dept. of State

i.
In needy dawn’s tabula rasa, shred
through breaches in the birch like candleflame
refracted, flung through flashed glass and calms,
as Ichetucknee disrobes habits of mist,
I splash the slim canoe, a floating pew.

The mind creates liturgical vestments;
they vex, featherless chicks pecking for feed.
A broken heart paddles strangely: it bleeds
blood, needs blood. It begs, a feckless and cracked
flask that prays for shape of spring water

ii.
Although the spring is just a thing. It flows
from aquifer, hyaline through bedrock pits.
The parable of trees on the banks preach the chase
of sun and soil; the verse of dragonflies
incants the atom need to procreate and feed.

If it was only just the heron’s sweep,
the otter’s slip, indignant turtle glare,
quiescent flow, supplicant fawn and doe.
This hush, is it within or without me?
Is it scrub jay songs or songs of myself?

iii.
We sat in plastic circles, yellow rooms,
desperate to deserve salvation, told
to find a Higher Power. Fine. But, God,
what grace for nicotine thumbs, DT feet?
Alone, breakfast:
I once was lost but now

Am found.
They sang in church when I was young.
Was the hymn an echo, my voice right now,
or welled from other springs? A coffee trick,
perhaps, compelled halation through the blinds,
wrought mosaics inlaid with my cracked glass.

iv.
It may be how, like mouths open to pray,
the stream invokes river, or a wood stork
sainting; it may have been the want of me,
the open wound or suckling, skies precise
and rare as sapphire, oak monk robes of moss.

It may have been wonder, childlike awe,
primordial immanence in my tear ducts;
or, maybe just the child who needs to know,
who breathes dreaming into the world he floats.

What befell may have already been there:
in my bowels, in clear imagined depths
where mullet twine like a child’s friendship braid.
The child’s ease for tears: it may be these springs
are my tears, maybe the tears of angels;

maybe, there is no other god for me.

v.
If I could speak, articulate, shape words;
or, I’m just cursed, repeating all I’ve heard,
a mouthpiece forever, slowed to stone and root.
What self beyond reflection? Stare and yearn,
burnt and burning, to waste away and drown?

I fall into the mirror, the boreal shock,
and deep in the headspring’s gaped mouth I see
a blackness stretched back, but a rush of life,
flawless as the first breath, sharp as a spring sunrise,
bored into bedrock, black, back, the spring of myself.

What Else the Grapefruit Said

March 2, 2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle
Selected as winner of the 2021 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Diane Seuss

At the Primrose Gardens’ group home,
the guys share smokes around the picnic table;
the house itself exhales a heavy Lysoled and linty air.
Confined to an asphalt patch,
under the 24/7 eye of Neighborhood Watch
they slouch under overrated stars.

They have time: no AA tonight.
Under the driveway spotlight,
they lean, listening for the fenced dog’s advice.
Brandon swears, “Horror movies put me here,
that and the drugs.”

Back empty-handed from a ShopRite run, Little James explains,
“The grapefruits were talking.”
Grocery voices again,
“They say, ‘Don’t buy me.’”
Never mind the ice pick in somebody’s eye
that sent him up.

Inside, the house hums clean
as the dryers tumble on cycle “fluff.”
They’re like seven Snow Whites,
worn out after another day
of scrubbing, mopping, vacuuming,
as if conscience could be cleared by a good once-over,
and a well-made bed.

Conned on all counts, I’m here to see my son,
—the witch’s apple of my eye—
but they all greet, “Hiya Mom.”
Big Eric wails, “When you gonna bake that lemon meringue?”
I lie easily,
promising, “Next time, next time.”

Pill

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Louise Robertson

           Sometimes I,
                      I mean you,
         I mean I,
are
like an advil stuck
in a pocket of my/your throat

and I/you wonder if I,
I mean you,
I mean I,

am dissolving there—
easing the ligaments,
except the body

isn’t eased, nor ligaments
hushed and I can still feel you,
I mean me,

I mean you
there in the neck
waiting, in fact,

hard as a choke.

Poem for Paul Who Never Forgets My Birthday Even Though I Never Remember His

November 29, 2021.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Alyssandra Tobin

paul says                                careful with the benzos
& I’m like I think of you
whenever                 my therapist brings em up      &
he’s like aww dunno if sweet’s the word
but it’s nice                                        to be thought of

okay sure let everyone see my cute belly let
everyone know I covet some people I’m
supposed to hate paul’s stupid meth’d
out calls unbearable his empty bottles his days
& months wild-eyed & away

once we wore each others jeans
his tiny gold waist in my teen girl pants
now    on the phone he says what’s up
ya fuckin guinea! he teaches me to play iron
man he gives me that   ninth step apology that
making of meandering amends

me so scared of dying & him always
chest deep in it I sit so quietly       a
very good dog in her dim little room
but he            gives me cocky courage he
gives me warm love that boston street salt
kinda love that let’s never brawl kinda love
that I’ll kiss your dirt love          that I’ll help you lie
to chicks love that mall parking lot love      that
if I’m a blight you’re a blight kinda love
that noogie that cackle that snakebite that
augur        that yeah                          I’ll call you on
your bullshit pastures if you call me when
my dumb pig jumps her sty off to somewhere
cleaner than both our loud green yards

I Love You Too, Bro

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alex Howe

Featured Image: Mun by Sam Warren

–for Catya McMullen

Beauty rears its ugly head – Assassins

You can be non-suicidal and less than jazzed about being here, two
Juuls at once like a pacifist dragon or the mild Dionysus of bad

ideas. Skip the Trix rabbit’s abjection: gift yourself the gift of
desperation, the terrible utility of popcorn for breakfast. “Whatever

you find uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium becomes its
signature, cherished and emulated as soon as it can be avoided”

explains Brian Eno bombing by on rollerblades into the flip phone
flipping shut into his fanny pack. The hotel’s Mahogany Hall

blooms two hundred vape plumes the moment the emcee mentions
prohibition on same. These teen alcoholics don’t drink, they bong

Monster, fuck senseless, talk about drinking. Pray to doorknobs.
Play Mafia. Splash the ping-pong ball into the cup of Red Bull.

Drop the sick beat. Crack your glow stick.

The Last Vacation

May 13, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Shannon C. Ward

Featured art: Untitled Collage by Kennedy Cardenas

You beat time on my head -Theodore Roethke

Her husband has taken the children swimming.
She tries to speak, but her mouth is filled with coins.
She washes them down with vodka, vomiting.

She knows what it means to dream of sinning.
She’s the mother of four beautiful boys,
and her husband has taken them swimming. Read More

Without Pain

January 30, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma

All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.

My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something

to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk

of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.

On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.

A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.

You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—

What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.

radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled

whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us

to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,

lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?

Lucky

January 29, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Firer by Felicity Gunn

The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light

reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made

blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).

And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t

pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.

I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name

might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle

sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags

swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs

screaming chinga tu madre.

Villainous Villanelle

May 15, 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

by: Denise Duhamel

My id spits and licks his lips, trips my conscience,
my ego, Miss Goody Two Shoes.
Her neon pink laces make him nauseous.

Just Say No

May 28, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Feliphe Schiarolli

We didn’t say a word when the officer visited our classroom.
We didn’t pass a note or mumble, didn’t blink when the TV
flickered on, when the stats, wrapped in white, settled
on the screen. We didn’t dare color outside the lines
of the worry-eyed cartoon character buying weed from a teenage
bully or the gang of stick figures shouting in the margins.

We pretended not to see each other,
not to know the smell of bong smoke, late at night,
how it would drift through the air vents with their
laughter, how it would rise in a fog as we slept.

We pretended not to flinch when the egg hit the pan,
the yolk thundering against the cladded aluminum,
or when the officer pointed to the display of syringes
on the screen, the scenes of cherubic teens
snorting a line for the first time, the background darkening,
their eyes, lifeless, because the result is death,
the officer said, while pointing to a photo of a casket.

We pretended not to know how the dead could rise,
how they rose each morning to put away our cereal boxes
and make our beds, how they were waiting for us now
in their long white robes smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye, their tired bodies floating across the pearly
linoleum floors, the bones in their fingers thrumming
the edge of the kitchen sink to the sound of Clarence Clemons
in their heads, “The Promised Land” rising like a dark cloud
from the desert floor, their eyes lost in the throbbing
autumnal light, the snaking of branches across
the kitchen window, the tick-tock of the wind against
the leaves, how it feels like eternity, as they watch
for the bus, the broken ice maker buzzing,
the dishwasher rumbling, milk parting their burned coffee,
waiting for their children to return to them
to wipe their small skulls clean.

Coronation with Plastic Flowers

May 28, 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Karl Blossfeldt

She says it feels like flowers blooming in her veins.
                                The lilies watch her, unmoved
in the window.
                                She becomes the petals’
white polyester sheen, its rigid spine, slumped posture
                                leaning against the rim
of an old coffee mug filled with week-old cigarette butts.
                                This is how
I will remember her: bottles of pills, the walls scumbled
                                yellow, a flower blooming
in her veins, her gray breath rising

                              in a haze thirty years ago
the way she placed each plastic flower away from
                              the sun, the sting, anything
that could touch the color of the petal as if the light
                              could drag each one into the white,
worn sky, make it fade before her eyes. What else is beauty for?
                              but to be spun, set on a window sill
curtains drawn, petals hugged in dust, as she slept,
                              no sun to tell her if it was day or night,
the three of us kids trying to keep still, feeling our way
                              through the dark dreamt room,
unable to understand that this was the tick-tock of time.
                              This was what it meant
to live forever.

                  Only nothing lives forever.
                                                The perfect moment—

the gardenias in full bloom
                                chatter staggering through a promenade,
the quivering flit of sparrows chasing
                                the listless light of noon
until suddenly even this ends,
                                 until suddenly a car alarm ruins everything,
the chatter dissolves into people
                                 screaming over each other,
birds fleeing, the owner trying to turn the damn thing off.

            Maybe there were too many moments
that could never stay quiet or whole in her hands
            like the day we took
our first steps, said our first words, or the day
            she fell in love,
slept all night in his open arms, dreamt of the way
            he looked at her as the ocean
wind tossed her floral dress,
            dreamt of the way time could stop,
only to wake up and find every living thing
            changed in some way

everything except
the flowers in her hands.

We Remember You for Now

February 12, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Featured Art: Figurative Abstraction by Unknown

Now when my heart beats, it sounds like
crunched leaves skittering, the revving up

of a broken-down Honda. I can’t visit him
at a cemetery, or even the park. Scatter

my ashes there, he asked, and then injected
god knows how much, enough to warrant

a coroner call. Hahaha. Joke is Heather said nope,
stuffed and stored him in the back

of our mother’s closet. He lives there now,
sucking up the radiator heat. Joel, damn,

man. Come back and lick the spilt fizz off
the Budweiser can again. No one here

is going anywhere if I have a say, and how
didn’t I have a say with you? You plunged,

you syringed, each time needling—gentle,
I hope, as my grandmother crocheting

a winter hat for your oldest girl. I won’t
for long torture myself for you, I thought,

biting into a string of candy hearts around
my neck, your kid insisting, eat it, the sick-

sweet sticky hands of a two-year-old with
a dad resting inside a shoebox next to

a bowling ball. You did it. Congratulations.
I’m elated. I’m devastated. I’m a copycat

singing your songs to your girls to sleep.
Listen, creep: we remember you for now,

but now is a ragged dog, dragging its bum
leg along the buzzing halls of a new house.

Rumors About Dread Mills

April 27, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rodney Jones

Featured Images: Rouen Cathedral, West Façade by Claude Monet, 1894, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

1974

At last they have him in church, a short service and the family silent, but the moments after the funeral are like a test.

True: The new base-tube press at Lockland Copper weighed sixty-seven tons. When they had completed the building and brought it in the door, six engineers agreed they would have to lift the roof to get the crane in and lower it into the pit. He heard from Tip Smith, a drinking buddy, a welder on the job, and wrote the board, saying he would do it for 10,000. Went to the ice plant, ordered eigh- teen blocks, filled the pit, rolled the press onto the ice; then, as the ice melted, pumped out the water.

True: Drunk every day for sixteen years. False: Mostly homebrew or moon- shine.

True: Every morning Maurice Orr’s rooster pissed him off. False: He caught the rooster in a sack, dug a hole behind the house, buried it with just the neck and head sticking out, cranked the mower, and mowed the lawn.

False: The story that besotted on the back lawn he ordered Jawaharal to dance and choreographed the steps with a Colt revolver. (Gunsmoke.)

True: Jawaharal inherited his logic gene and argued when he called him “Jerry.”

False: He never hit a lick at a snake. Once he pruned the grapevine. Twice, after midnight, he picked roasting ears from Leldon Spence’s garden.

True: When the money from the press job ran out, he wrote bad checks until his name was published on the glass doors of every business from Cold Springs to Decatur. It hit him then one day: go from store to store, copy all the names, print the list of deadbeats twice a year and sell subscriptions to each store for fifty dollars.

True: His Deadbeat Protection Flier taking off before the Credit Protection Act: drinking Jim Beam in the air over Georgia and Louisiana, he was a sloppy man who made a million dollars.

True: The gay son home from Palo Alto. The wife, a holy roller in a sari. His brilliant, inebriated redneck math, marks in the chicken yard. The liver. The heart—details of the unannotated life: grease-prints on Erdös in Combinator- ics, unused tickets to see Conway Twitty—Cliffs Notes for Abyss Studies—

His mind at the end like a hand reaching for a pocket when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“I would kill myself if there were anyone better.”