Treading a Path / In the Portage Bay Cafe by Robert Nisbet

Treading a Path

Nineteen-seventies half-heard-of place.

You needed to tread up through the garlic 

and the raspberry canes to the hall,

a sort of hall, with a lovely grained

and golden floor. Sometimes committees

of a kind would sit around there

on bean bags, but mostly there’d be

jazz and readings and swing and even theory,

the poetry of the impecunious.

The atmosphere was misty and loving,

not the hard coin of commitment

and convention, but un-metalled love,

as joyously unfocused as the garlic smell

and the raspberry-scented evening air. 

 

* First appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician in 2019

In the Portage Bay Café  

 

At breakfast time, the snow spins

its carousel through Seattle's winter streets.

Our meal out is an encampment

in America's gregarious heart, as waiters

teem, proffer their service's glad hand.

There are Rancher's Breakfasts, syrup,

pepper bacon, wafting coffee. In the midst,

in the steam of bonhomie, my grandson,

who is four months old, looks through 

and at it all, the ketchup bottles

and the cream-topped rolls, with utter

wonderment. Behind him, down town,

sky-scraping blocks raise their challenge

to the ferries and the islands and the inlets

out in the sound. On again, and there are

mountains, out in the countryside's

long reach, their peaks capped

by the brilliance of snow.

 

* First appeared in Atrium (Worcestershire, England) in 2023.

Robert Nisbet has been published widely over 15 years in Britain and the USA. His collection, In a Small County, appeared from Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) last year.

Get Through / Kite by Byron Beynon

Get Through

I imagine myself 
inside an Edward Hopper painting, 
sitting in a diner 
alone and motionless, 
the black coffee getting cold, 
waiting for something 
within me to change 
when suddenly the atmosphere 
eases and I hear 
a trumpet sound 
played by a lean, 
cool Chet Baker 
embracing my silent mood, 
reaching out across 
the evening shadows, 
touching my sleeve, 
taking me along 
with those strong adjectives of music 
which climb and soar 
above the oppressive 
streets and traffic, 
telling me calmly of a way 
to get through.

  

Kite 

Her body is five months pregnant, 
she stands on a hill 
laughing to herself. 
Controlling the fresh 
strings of the kite 
she kindles a red 
swirl of ribbons. 
The movement of blind 
air carries towards a life 
soon to enter 
this fast world, 
touching it like purity, 
the gravity and pull of imagination, 
an innocent about to argue 
with dangerous time, 
the shining heartbeat of flesh and blood.

 

Byron Beynon lives in West Wales. His work has appeared in several publications including Poppy Road Review, The London Magazine, Galway Review, Poetry Wales and Black Mountain Review. Collections include The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions), The Sundial (Flutter Press) and Where Shadows Stir (The Seventh Quarry Press).

Whispers and Secrets / Mid-February by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

Whispers and Secrets

Whispers and secrets
fuel the moon’s avarice.
It is never satiated as
it inhales all it hears.

Its light is fixated on us,
a witness to all we say
and do. The only thing
it cannot do is read our

minds, which is why we
should not blurt out what
we are thinking. Sleep
talkers have no remedy.
Through open windows the
moonlight inhales each word.





Mid-February

In mid-February
the streets near the Flower Market
in Downtown Los Ángeles
are heavy with traffic.
What is normally a minute drive
from Maple to 9th Street
turns into the longest ten minutes
you have ever driven.

You think of buying flowers
for the woman who keeps your
heart burning for a love out of reach,
but there is nowhere to park
as your anxiety heightens.
Ten minutes turns into twenty
and still there is nowhere to park.
Your lunch break is nearly over.
So you make plans on coming out
here the next day before the sun
is out and most of the world is asleep

including the woman you love.

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in Los Angeles. His poetry and art has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Escape Into Life, Four Feathers Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, and Unlikely Stories. His most recent poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.

Sometimes by Robert Cooperman

Sometimes, when sleep eludes me
like an escaped balloon, I tell myself,
as if a parent reading a bedtime story,
the folktale of the Grateful Dead:

Sometime during the Middle Ages
a traveling merchant pays the debts
of a recent corpse who’d died a pauper.
The tradesman continues on his way,
and in the middle of a dark wood,
is attacked by highwaymen,
and just as the rogues are about
to kill him for having nothing left to rob,

a rider thunders out of the mist
and drives off the would-be killers,
the merchant gape-mouthed: the horseman
is the wretched pauper, the Grateful Dead,
returning one good deed with another.

My silent recitation calms, comforts me,
eases me into sleep, no matter
how many times I tell it to myself:
knowing goodness is rewarded,
if only in old stories.

Robert Cooperman's latest collection is An Oar for Odysseus (Kelsay Books). His most recent chapbook is To Tell the Tale (Grateful Dead Studies Association).

The Wolf and Little Red / Found My Magic by Linda M. Crate

the wolf and little red

they told the tale
all wrong
because they didn't
want all of the girls
running after wolves,

but little red riding

hood fell in love
with a werewolf;

and he fell in love with her—

her parents disapproved,
but she was of age
so she ran away and married
the man she loved;

paved a new way out of
flowers and ambition—

she knew they couldn't
understand,
but she couldn't fathom
why they couldn't see she
protected and loved
her wolf and he protected
and loved her; the same.



found my magic

i was born
under the moon,
perhaps that's
why they could never
pull me down to earth;

my head has always
been in the clouds

as i walk with stars—

i was always told to
be more realistic,
and perhaps that could
take me from point a to b;

yet i craved something
different than that—

so i followed after my dreams
and the shouts of crows
instead and found my magic;

and that was more a blessing
than reality could've been.

Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose poetry, short stories, and essays have been published in a myriad of magazines. She has sixteen published chapbooks, the latest being: fairytale love (Magique Publishing, October 2025).

Sir and Lady Real / Incubi by Kathryn Lasseter

Sir and Lady Real

Curiously marked creatures

      that slink and slouch by night.

How they gravitate to the cobra shed,

      moisten and glisten in response to 

owl hoots.

 

Whither is the zither of their metered measure?

 

I am frightened by coils and coiling,

      slimy undulations in the mossy 

garden, overgrown like untended Eden.

 

I planted a wild rose there once,

      wild because I didn’t really plant it.

It sprang forth from my grubby

      outstretched hand like a bad faerie

turned Tinkerbelle.

 

 

 

 

Incubi

 

On dusky evenings--

strangers linger in dim reaches

of palpitating pasts and presents

reaching for me

or the hem of my gown

as if to make off with

all my loose ends.

 

Waking up in dawn’s dew

my aching fingers stretch 

out for shadow lovers

offering soft lips, unfanged,

insatiable.

 

Kathryn Lasseter lives in Oregon and enjoys walking under tall trees. She has poems in Winged Penny Review, You Might Need to Hear This, BarBar, Heimat Review and other journals.

A Winter Day, You're Asleep by Kenneth Pobo

I get up early and by
the front window I see
soppy flakes covering
my car. Our plants

grow by the sill. A crown-of-thorns
with a dozen salmon blossoms.
The adenium has two blossoms,
our own Madagascar
in the living room. Two sluggish
orchids send out new stalks.

A dead gray sky
tells me to drop my dreams
of spring. You’re upstairs,
sleeping late. I need heat,
the house chilly despite
a red-coiled space heater.

Kenneth Pobo (he/his) has a new chapbook out from Half Inch Press called It’s Me, Dulcet Tones. Poems will be appearing in Ley Lines Literary Review, In Parentheses, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere.