Tipton Poetry Journal #63 (Winter 2025) by Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal Tipton Poetry Journal

Editor’s Note

Tipton Poetry Journal, located in the heartland of the Midwest, publishes quality poetry from Indiana and around the world.

Statistics: This issue features 34 poets from the United States (21 unique states), and 5 poets from India, Ireland, Singapore, Ukraine and United Kingdom.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “The Buddha Weeps” written by JL Kato. JL’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 3. The featured poem was chosen by the Board of Directors of Brick Street Poetry, Inc., the Indiana non-profit organization who publishes Tipton Poetry Journal.

Cover Photo: Holy Flag by Barry Harris

Barry Harris, Editor

All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual contributors and may not be used without their permission.

Tipton Poetry Journal is published by Brick Street Poetry Inc., a tax-exempt non-profit organization under IRS Code 501(c)(3). Brick Street Poetry Inc. publishes the Tipton Poetry Journal, hosts the monthly poetry series Poetry on Brick Street and sponsors other poetry-related events.

How Does a Pine Tree Die?

JimTilley

The stumps of many pines reveal a healthy heartwood at the core and disintegrated sapwood rings outward to the bark, the skin too thin, unable to repel an onslaught from the outside world.

Woodpeckers understand. But for some dead pines, there must be insults from the inside outward, decayed pith and heartwood, with sapwood rings still hardy coniferous cancer.

For me, it’s the constant barrage from the outside that takes the greatest toll, not the rotting of my soul. And yet, those outside strikes arise by way of an inside job, not a foreign enemy, but ourselves.

It’s on us.

We the people too many not seeing far enough ahead put a select few in charge. Now, both pith and heartwood going… going… going… going… going… gone.

Jim Tilley lives in New York State and has published four fulllength collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, On the Art of Patience, was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The Buddha Laughs

JLKato

Embedded on shards of a shattered mirror are reflections of the Buddha laughing. For weeks, I kept store-bought bread out of my loved one’s sight, since she started to obsess over soft loaves and buns. I first noticed bread missing when I could not find slices for the grilled cheese sandwich I tried to make for her. I shopped earlier in the day, so there should have been a fresh loaf in the pantry. Pressed for time, I concentrated on serving tomato soup. That’s when I noticed her at the table pinching the springy loaf on her lap. I tried to intervene, but she clutched tighter. If she finds happiness in squeezing cheap, fresh bread, who am I to squash that joy? Over time, I found evidence of her thefts everywhere: crumbs in an empty wrapper, a half loaf beneath her bed pillow, crusts in the laundry basket. I, too, can play the game. I stashed new loaves in the oven, the dishwasher, an out-ofreach closet shelf, even behind jars of crunchy peanut butter. It became a contest. One morning, as the coffeemaker gurgled, she knocked over my half-filled mug. As I stopped to wipe the spill, she seized the bread by the toaster, cradling the loaf with both arms pressing her chest, running like a linebacker scooping up a fumble. I found her in the backyard, tossing morsels to starlings as she chewed sunflower seeds from the feeder.

bird chitter dissipates cat sleeps on my loved one’s lap snow fog on cold ground

The Buddha Weeps

JLKato

A woman I barely know creeps unbidden into my bed she screeches pulls out the sheets commands me gone next morning she smiles asks where I’ve been says she misses me

JL Kato was selected Indiana Literary Champion in 2022 for his work as a poetry ambassador and advocate. His book, Shadows Set in Concrete, was selected the Indiana Best Book of Poetry in 2011 by the Indiana Center for the Book. His poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, So It Goes, and many other journals and magazines.

Only You

CharlesElin

History falls to the bottom of the line already written in the eyes of the looking. The maniac plays it somewhat fine. He listens to the music and adds the cooking.

Where would we be without peace of mind. Where would we be without your kind.

Startle Reflex

CharlesElin

Too much time alone meant the only voice was his own, reading his own words. Sometimes they worked as poems, but never as an understandable voice on the phone. He heard himself try the practical and expected. It was gone. He had to hang up, out of fear. The computer was closed. He sat in his swivel chair and folded his arms. The eyes were waiting to shut. He dosed off and woke with a startle. This happened to his mother before death. One sleep led to another. Now, he was awake.

Charles Elin lives in Philadelphia and worked with the late writer/editor, Larry Fagin, from January 2012 until his death in 2017. Larry published a chapbook of his poems and stories in 2014. Then added two later stories to Larry’s 2016 magazine, The Delineator. Flash fiction pieces have been published by Columbia Journal, Corium Magazine and Midway. Charles’ poems have appeared in over a dozen literary journals, including Rosebud, Forge, Mantis. His latest chapbook is Orange Fanta Mind what Comes and Goes is Charles’ first book of poems, published in 2024. He works as a psychiatric social worker in private practice.

Our Provenance

TaraMenon

We are forged out of star dust, celebrities in the making, but I prefer looking at our provenance in a different way, one that takes us to a loftier platform.

We are of an essence that can’t be diluted, faded, chipped away, melted no matter how many eons pass.

We exist, we always have been, and we always will. Our origins bring us together, humanity, flora, and fauna, and yes, aliens no matter how distant.

The Vedas identify this essence as Brahman. Call It God like I do or any of the names religion gives Her who is genderless.

Tara Menon, a poet, short story writer, and essayist, has had more than seventy poems published in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. Some of her recent poems have been published in Cider Press Review, Last Leaves Magazine, The New Verse News, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Tara lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Disappear

KenCraft

The overwhelmed clench their eyes and cover their ears; I inhale deep breaths, choose ways to disappear.

I take to the garden, silk down a lily’s white throat, scratch into the furrowed bark under a plate of red oak,

rest in lightning cracks of a paved road’s wear, climb to the anthill’s door, drop down its sip of air,

settle between shoreline pebbles as they softly bubble, grow warm under a raven’s wing, its dark rise, its ruffle,

vanish beneath the flap of a bass’s gulp and gill, stare at purple sky from the edge of a sill,

linger in yeasty caves of bold and airy dough, float between the caws of conversational crows.

And when I’m too removed from sensing society’s needs, I rise from the snow print a junco’s foot leaves,

crawl out of a well’s depths, its stench of desire, reach for the hope between firefly night and firefly fire.

Inauguration Day

KenCraft

Let’s avoid the television all day and all night. Let’s pretend the house isn’t a hidden utopia caged by the calendar. Come here. Let me hug your warmth to the tundra of my hope, swear on the Bible of your breath and heartbeat soft against mine. On this day especially, let the metonymy of our mouths speak to our beliefs, let us sing the next 1,461 days away and come out of truth’s long night as unbowed as we are today.

Ken Craft teaches at York County Community College in Maine. A Pushcart Prize recipient, he has also published in The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, The Pedestal, Spillway, and numerous e-zines. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants. You can visit him at kencraftauthor.com.

Ode to Washing My Hands

ChristopherToddAnderson

My hands curl into one another like twin embryos in this womb of warm water. How rarely my body feels like home. Palm to palm, palm to knuckle, calloused fingertips touching tender bending wrists, my hands are like old friends finding their way toward love. This must be how it felt to float, a newmade creature, in the teeming foam of primal oceans. Soap lathers into suds, a chorus of round mouths praising the world. This might be history’s best miracle: to wash away so easily

a billion harms. Water fills oceans, falls from the sky, wells up underground, flows inside our veins as if

the world says be clean be clean. There are so many ways to touch one’s body, none gentle as this caress.

No wonder Michelangelo imagined Creation as two hands stretching toward contact. But here in my Monday kitchen, above drainpipe stink and a sink cluttered with soup bowls, garlic peels, and this morning’s lump of coffee grounds, this is no Sistine dream. Inside their cloud of lather, my workworn hands are nothing heavenly, just two solitary lubbers glad to have this brief warm comfort.

Ode to My Father's Death Bed

ChristopherToddAnderson

This bed is the river that will carry him away. Blue flannel eddies around his body, washes into eyes gone pale from springtime’s last thin film of cataract ice. All day, nurses and hospice workers float above him like clouds. His body is a stone. We are all stones troubling the stream. The world breaks against us, parts and flows, closes behind us as if we never were. Just hope the river of our passing runs strong and empties into a sunbedazzled sea.

Christopher Todd Anderson is Professor of English at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, where he teaches courses in American literature, poetry, environmental literature and film, and popular culture. A 2018 Pushcart Prize recipient (nominated by Tipton Poetry Journal), Anderson has published poetry in numerous national literary magazines, including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Wisconsin Review, Tar River Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, among others. Anderson has also published academic articles on images of garbage and waste in American poetry and in the film WALL-E.

My Twenty-Year Old Philosopher

DorisLynch

For Kristen

You could have been one of them: if born in another century, if you followed the determined strut of another sex, paid obeisance to an emperor’s official stringency. Or wandered beside Chinese rivers scribing poems on oracle bones or large turtle shells beside a boulder-studded river. You might have posed questions about the nature of the universe: what makes the pine, the clouds and boulders alike? How do they learn to speak to us?

In the Middle Ages in your monk’s robes you would have won (or lost who can say?) the enmity of the church’s theologians. To live is human, to question, divine.

Now you hurry through Pittsburgh’s crowded streets, past the Tower of Learning. On this almost starless night an orange round sphere hangs over you. Questions race through your head. One night you see a green streak sear across the sky. So large and bright, you’re not sure whether you’ve just experienced the most unique thought in the world or the Martians are finally landing.

Harpo Greets the Desert Stars

DorisLynch

~ Harpo Marx, 1952

Late at night, I practice my harp deep in the dry arroyo. Cricket-competing, I play fierce and hard, forcing the strings to screech hallo to the stars, what's cookin' to the maverick tumbleweeds, bravissimo to the stray meteors which zip across the sky. My angel-instrument teaches me how to weave sky's silence with night's sounds to make song. From the scrub oak, the precariously-balanced boulders, I learn how to pulse this ticking universe its want-more, want-more with its rustlings of animal desires and the night-hawk's dive. With each note I praise everything: night's ebony mask, this shadowy arroyo and that distant coyote ready to peel apart her lips, raise her throat, and howl.

Doris Jean Lynch’s poetry collection, Swimming to Alaska, was published by Bottom Dog Press in autumn, 2023. Meteor Hound, her book of haibun, also came out in 2023. In December, she was nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun. Doris lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Mending a Postage Stamp Quilt on a Winter Evening

DaveMalone

Take up thread and needle. Don’t think; repair.

You never imagined this quilt would fray, lose squares, plagued by ripped and deep splits.

Here is the worn world in your lap and what can you do now, save close the gap of all that you’ve lost with a ladder stitch?

Scarecrow

DaveMalone

Cold in my father’s shadow. Stuck in the barn like a scarecrow.

Its leaking guts trail behind fodder for wren nests, their warm homes lined.

My dad tosses the strawman into the loft. There’s no last stand for thin useless ones or pale sons.

Dave Malone is a poet and playwright from the Missouri Ozarks. His poems have appeared in Plainsongs, Midwest Review, and San Pedro River Review. His most recent poetry book is Bypass (Aldrich Press, 2023). He can be found online at davemalone.net or on Instagram @dave.malone.

Breastfeeding in Brooklyn

CaitiQuatmann

The dawn is soft & there's a whisper of sunlight over the sleepy city; just cradle your arm around me.

I've roamed through this crowded park a thousand times & I've realized that the bench marked the best spot for sunrise, isn't quite right. Snuggle me in a quiet café with the smell of fresh bread rising. I've held a small, warm bottle in a nursery & thought about beginnings.

I've cradled a tiny, fisted hand on my own. I've pulled in my scarf over my shoulder & nursed in the corner of a bustling party, feeling like a warrior. Unbuttoned my blouse in that dimly lit room & held you close gently against my chest. The early morning hustle is waking & stirring. The neighborhood children have their scooters out, eager for the day. Do you remember what it felt like to be so needed that your body answered without thought, like earth responding to rain? I want it like that like roots finding their way towards a source. Like two dew-drops clinging to the same leaf, shimmering in unison. Like the trees have whispered secrets across the skyline & you are the spirit of a gardener, who always found solace in soil.

Caiti Quatmann (she/her) is a disabled and queer writer residing in St. Louis. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Yoke (MyrtleHaus) and Editor-in-Chief for HNDL Mag. Her work is forthcoming or appearing in Rattle, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, manywor(l)ds, Thread and others. Find her on social media @CaitiTalks.

Forebodings

MarjieGiffin

Television newscasts rain down on my ears with the thud of huge drops on heavy mud. Sometimes I strain to listen and sometimes I try to drown out the words with muffled cries. Meanings do not escape me; I have studied history so know a coming storm when I hear the rumbling. No doubt we are stumbling backwards to a time we vowed never to repeat, and yet here we are, the clouds darkening around us while our peers dither and dance like the sun is still shining, like a madman isn’t the puppeteer pulling their strings.

Marjie Giffin is a Midwestern writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly, Flying Island, The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Heron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Agape Review and the anthologies The Lives We Have Live(d) and What Was and What Will Be, Leave them Something, Reflections on Little Eagle Creek, and Stormwash: Environmental Poems. Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers and her first chapbook, Touring, was published in 2021. A second chapbook, The Late Hour, is forthcoming this spring (2025) from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Indianapolis and is active in the Indiana Writers’ Center and has taught both college writing and gifted education.

Mom

& Dr. Mario

BenHyland

Us in blue – that’s how I prefer this memory –when you could chew, before our talks became a loop, yellow rimmed jaw slack with chapped lips, pills scattered. That’s not what matters. Mother, son, Nintendo, reclined with wine, pushing B for hours, LCD screen glow dimmed in darkness. Little horned virus, a tongue flick every other frame, we saw you on the monitor. We’d pass the controller, kill pixelated virus after virus only to see another level, until we lost & laughed at loss with the good Doctor. But my mind selects the Hydra again: left/right with my bleach rag on your wall garden painted with liquid shit. Or your red nightie blown down the street, neck outstretched, naked driveway screams –the many ills I can’t cure for you. I want to pause there in our living room, your blue smile, blue hair & heart. & beyond you, is that the door? Its loose knob, the one that fell when I touched it, brass screws & all.

Ben Hyland lives in Florida. His poetry is collected in four chapbooks – most recently, Shelter in Place (Moonstone Press, 2022) – and has been featured in multiple journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hawai’i-Pacific Review, and Delta Poetry Review. As a career coach, he has helped hundreds of jobseekers find employment, even throughout the pandemic. Readers can connect and follow his work at www.benhylandlives.com.

King Louis

PatrickT.Reardon

In the cathedral window, King Louis cares for the wounded soldiers to the shock of his generals.

King Louis, the French saint, akin to a holy American president, akin to a blessed Chicago mayor, a saintly alderman of the West Side Bloc.

Holy holy holy.

The book of numbers, the spirit among them, all the people prophets.

Over the pulpit, a huge brown wood seashell without Venus the book instead.

Fell into fault-finding.

If your eye sins. Drive out demons.

Spirit moves like the dewfall. Holy of holies.

The shirtless screamer on the plaza outside scares the stolid tourists, announcing the gospel.

Patrick T. Reardon, who was a Chicago Tribune reporter for 32 years, has published six poetry collections, including Darkness on the Face of the Deep and Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems. His next collection Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans, is forthcoming from Lavender Ink. He has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize.

Photo credit: Steve Kagan

A Secret Chord

ClaireScott

After Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

How did you do it, David play that secret chord I can’t find the right combination of notes or numbers prayers or chants or passwords maybe god is a bit deaf or deep in dementia or maybe he turned away long ago when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, along with that silly rabbit but by mistake I threw god into the mix

Leaving a spirit wound that hasn’t healed

I need your help, David I am working my way through the declensions of grief after a rough diagnosis stuck on anger like br’er rabbit stuck to the tar baby trying to move toward bargaining light years from acceptance yet I am hopelessly hopeful that one day I will please the Lord and he will still my unquiet mind David, play that chord again this time for me

Gravitational Pull

ClaireScott

Did you know our planet shifts away from the sun more than two inches a year the sun losing mass, growing thin and weary, its gravitational pull fading as it fuses hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing energy per Einstein’s famous formula is that what is what is happening to you, God since often you are not about in the Quad are you tired of the humans you created wishing they will leave you alone with their offkey hallelujahs and self-centered prayers? did you know that right now we are closer to the sun than we will ever be is that true for you, God? because I don’t feel that close to you with all the famines, fires and floods the transwomen who can’t play basketball or use the ladies’ room, the shoeless children in the Darien Gap, the pregnant women on buses to Kansas or Florida our sun will be around for five billion years warming us in its embrace what about you, God?

Claire Scott is an award winning poet in Oakland, California who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

Centennial of the United Methodist City Cathedral LizDolan

~ Gary, Indiana 2025

Wear black Walk straight down to Washington and Sixth. Tour the Cathedral abandoned in‘75 a blitzkrieg: scattered bricks, a collapsed sanctuary shattered glass, a bloodied cross, a rubbled apse a graffitied altar: FUCX, FEAR, a volcanic penis. A silent organ. No sopranos, no perfect pitch, no alleluias here.

Now a hip destination for urban explorers for filmmakers, for Goth weddings.

Nearby, Michael Jackson's boyhood home still stands Had the high priest of pop not ravaged his own temple I know he would attend,would raise us up would moonwalk under the falling dome.

Ovens

LizDolan

Un regalo, a gift, from the bodega owner, our dog, Malo, slept under the pedestal oven on a burlap sack. My friend Molly named him Malo because he was so bueno.

Not so bueno were the horrors we heard whispered after the war by kids on the block about Jewish bodies burned in Nazi ovens. I wondered if Molly’s mother might fit into an oven.

Under our white-legged oven one night Malo whimpered then slipped into his final sleep. Molly and I held hands as we wept. On Friday evening her mother lit the Shabbat candle.

After drawing our hands around the candles and toward our faces three times we covered our eyes and prayed for light and joy for Malo and Molly and mine.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware.

Run to Me

GregoryStenta

Then, you were running from El Salvadoran civil war when I found you behind racks of Beatles CDs at the dingy, used CD shop hiding behind a poster of Let it Be. This was LA. 1994.

Mom thought you would be safe in LA, didn’t know of any Beatles fans in 1994 LA. We were high school lovers, made by the times we met in.

I was El Salvadoran too, liked the Beatles too. their singing didn’t help me with English, the way it helped you. You, you thought I should sing along too.

I didn’t. heart was tired of love songs. Always watching TV, our love became a love of fatigue, of ripe youth left behind. Still, each day I love you is sweet, like the over ripe Beatles songs you enjoyed so much.

When we first made love, I made love to our future not our shared past like you. The explosions

in our childhood streets crept into my bowels, flattened my spirit years ago, and I cannot kiss away your nightmares. The restlessness of your sleep tells me you still remember those disappearing at night in our country, dragged through the streets. Watching our backs in LA, violence is still around us: we thought we wouldn’t have to cover our children’s eyes in America.

Gregory Stenta lives in Singapore. As a 2010 graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, he was in the initial class of the MFA program there. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, including most recently in New Feathers Anthology. " His war poetry has also appeared in Consequence Magazine and War, Literature and the Arts.

Aloft

ChristopherDuggan

Frodo and Sam pick their way across the jagged, rocky landscape of Mordor while my crush walks past me across the hot cedar boards of our deck in a yellow twopiece swimsuit, jumping off the edge into the clear water of the pool with her knees pulled up to her ribcage. I hold my book against my chest to guard against the splash. Those three yellow triangles of her suit formulate the geometry of my fantasies during the summers of my youth. Geometry is my worst subject in high school, and shapes and numbers remain elusive to me into adulthood. An equilateral triangle has three sides of the same length, and St. Paul said these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. They remain until they don’t, and they leave all at once or one at a time, driving off in a cloud of dust in a car filled with her belongings and the kids looking on next to me from the driveway. Kids grow up and then fly from the nest, and sometimes they call or text in the evenings while a frozen pizza slowly browns in the oven. I fly for my job to business meetings in Tallahassee, Fort Collins, and Albuquerque with copy writers, graphic designers, and marketing executives who listen at the table in expensive suit coats and ask us what else we’ve got. On the 737, I sit with my book while the man next to me mutters in his sleep and people in the seats around me stare at the screens of their phones and tablets, texting to boyfriends, playing games, texting to girlfriends, and watching movies. On one of them in front of me to the right, Frodo and Sam pick their way across the jagged, rocky landscape of Mordor, and I close my eyes and wait for a panel to blow off the side of the plane and settle to the ground like a leaf in autumn, along with the books and tablets and dreams and hundreds and hundreds of fluttering white cocktail napkins.

Christopher Duggan is a communications professional living in St. Charles, Missouri. He earned an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. Fiction and poetry have been published in The Cobalt Review, Compose, and The Examined Life. His novel, Water From the Moon was shortlisted in The Letter Review's unpublished books contest.

Run

ZhihuaWang

Sometimes I run, not because I love it, but because I’m not satisfied with my speed. I’m still so ignorant in this new world. I’m still falling behind my plan. So I push myself to run, knowing the endorphins released from the workout will slow me down.

Zhihua Wang received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. Her work has been published in Across the Margin, Eunoia Review, Salamander Magazine, Not One of Us, and elsewhere.

In the house of my body

AjmiraKhatun

In the house of my body, there are unbidden guests: Migraine crashes at the door, Spondylitis crouches on the steps, Arthritis clatters the window.

They conspire in silence, sucking all my nutrients, fading my veins to barren rivers.

You celebrate independence day, waving banners in the sky. While I dream of freedom, longing to be released, from this aching house. And searching for peace in the house of your light.

Meet Ajmira Khatun, a poet from Birbhum, West Bengal, India. She earned her B.Ed. degree from Visva-Bharati University and is currently pursuing an MA in English Literature at Seacom Skills University. Her notable works include the poem "The Rose," published in Masticadores USA. Additionally, five of her poems were featured in A Fevers of the Mind Poetry Showcase. Two of her poems have been published in print in the anthology Youthful Elegies.

In the Artists' Studios

NancyKayPeterson

I lust after paperweights with brightly colored fishes and delicate octopi swimming in deep blue glass. I want these splashes of sea creatures to color my desk and shelves, but don’t have $200 to splurge on each brilliant piece and say so.

The artist’s husband-salesman says, “It takes a day or more to make just one.” I’m sure it does. Then I think about how long it takes to write a poem --

scribble it, type it, re-write it, set it aside, return to it again and again, until it’s submitted and maybe earns a free contributor’s copy.

There’s that question of what lasts? I look at the gleaming globes, not jealous, just wishing, I could fill them with poems.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, most recently in The Bluebird Word, Dash Literary Journal, HerWords, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, One Sentence Poems, RavensPerch, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review, Three Line Poetry and Tipton Poetry Journal. From 2004-2009, she co-edited and co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (Winona, Minnesota). Her work has been included in two anthologies: Haikus for Hikers (Brick Street Poetry, Inc.) and Play (Outsider Press). Finishing Line Press published her two poetry chapbooks, Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). She lives in Washington State. For more information, see www.nancykaypeterson.com.

Dreaming Double

RaimaLarter

A woman leaves the world and wakes from one dream into another. She is like an infant, newly born, blinking at the bright light, screaming at monsters with gloved hands and masked faces who yank her from the only life she’s ever known.

We sit outside the hospital, or in another land, not allowed to see her, or hear her final breath.

When my mother died, I was in Alaska. It was summer and the sun set at midnight. The room so bright I couldn’t sleep, and yet I did, waking from one dream into another.

There she was, stumbling down the frozen mountain, a young girl, terrified and not understanding that she had once been old, that she had once been my mother.

Tipton

Not understanding why the frozen tundra seared her bare feet. The room so bright and I woke blinking at the light, a newborn orphan.

Raima Larter is mainly a fiction writer with a few dozen short stories and three novels published (so far). Prior to being a full-time writer, she was a chemistry professor at IUPUI (Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis). She lives in Denver and serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Utopia Science Fiction magazine. You can read more about her work at raimalarter.com

Sangraal

KarenLaugel

The children have been waiting two hours now for dinner and finally, the father sets down whiskey and newspaper and calls them to the round table.

Not circular for equality, for the children eschew the head seat, and the mother always sits as Judas. Five place settings in devotional order, Vanity Fair napkins folded precisely under each fork in stark but hopeful shapes of enlightenment.

Baked meatloaf topped with ketchup mashed potatoes and weeping green beans, sour the air with compost or maybe decay. The menu varies but the pabulum spins in a predictable spiral and the mother is again parabled as not good enough.

He storms on his wife's bent head, her downcast gaze, her lapped hands, holding court to his children's rounded eyes. The oldest girl with courage or maybe innocence sits in the Siege Perilous, bears witness to the slaughter, and saws ground beef with an unnecessary blade.

Tipton Poetry Journal

The aftermath is routine, two girls with sponge and towel at sink, the orbiting mother flashing desperate smiles, the boy and his father vanished. Yet each in their silence hear her footsteps away, the flush of toilet, the force of faucet, the sibilant exhale of a forbidden cigarette.

Karen Laugel is a physician and emerging writer. She lives on the Delaware coast with her kayaks. Her poetry has appeared in Pen in Hand.

On the Couch

RobertEstes

I wake up

Is it still true?

Is it really true?

Yes

It’s still really true

Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 40-odd of his poems appeared in literary journals, including Gargoyle, Cola Literary Review, The Moth, Tipton Poetry Journal, Anacapa Review, Masque & Spectacle, Constellations, and Juniper.

The Little Green Book

TiaPaul-Louis

It appears

I was a prostitute, a traitor and I’m no good –far from the angel father thought of me, according to the Little Green Book from the attic I “summoned smoke” as the sorceress I was labeled on page nine by my beloved kin ( Beloved: undefined).

My maiden gown should’ve been red, it read, and not like the blue roses hung on the pews. It’s no wonder the doves fled and bats roamed over the roof above my marriage bed, according to the little green book written with letters of seventeenth-century calligraphy, with lead imitating ink.

I’m mean and insane, claimed the Little Green Book and with that being said, may it rest with the one truth it finally spoke and may God forgive the lioness in me it awoke.

Lifetimes

TiaPaul-Louis

Some lifetimes are centuries that pass on the tales and famous histories named Traditions which centuries later kill. Some lifetimes are decades that imitate centuries and even drag along a few myths that only confuse mankind in the future. They turn girls into women and women into elderlies disgraced by women. Some lifetimes are years of silent misery, later to become publicity for paralyzed consciousness – entertaining lack of confidence. Some lifetimes are weeks or hours that carry an infant, pretending the infant will be there always, but – some lifetimes are seconds like ones after a child’s birth when a mother hears no other sound but her own cry for her newborn who’s chosen – another lifetime.

Tia Paul-Louis is a fiction writer and poet from Florida. She began experimenting with songwriting at age 11 and later felt a deeper connection to poetry. Her themes portray family life, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values. She admires the freedom of expression in most forms of art such as music, acting, and painting.

New Shoes

GaryLark

With three cuttings of hay to bring in, those damned filberts to gather, picking berries for Hannah, weeding grandma's garden and my last year of high school I hardly have time to fish.

And this fellow going around talking about the evils of communism, the godless way some people live and how they're taking over. It's a little confusing since everything looks about the same.

He held a meeting at the Pentecostal church in McKinley and a few of us went to see what the hullabaloo was about. He was preaching alright, banging away, selling us the need to join up with his organization.

Now, most of us believe in God but we don't need to spend all our time talking about it. And this fellow telling us the country is going to hell reminds me of the guy selling spray cleaners, how to recruit people so we'd all get rich.

Well, I have to get money for shoes, new pair every year, and Levi's for school, so I can't spend my time wallowing in theoreticals. And there are trout to catch.

Gary Lark’s most recent collections are Coming Down the Mountain, Easter Creek,and Daybreak on the Water, His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, and Rattle. Gary and his wife Dorothy live in Oregon's Rogue Valley. https://garylark.work

Wait/Remember

KitKennedy

A line, darkness divides. That divide feels impenetrable and time an indiscriminate hunger. Wait, this moment will catch up with a future. Light a candle, feed a neighbor say the word "cornucopia" slowly three times, as if you believe.

Kit Kennedy is a queer elder living in Walnut Creek, CA. Work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Great Weather for Media, First Literary Review-East, Gyroscope, Muse Pie Press among others. She serves as Poet in Residence at SF Bay Times and Resident Poet at Ebenezer Lutheran herchurch. Please visit: https://poetrybites.blogspot.com

Cone Flowers, Yellow

LynetteLamp

They always look droopy, like tired farm wives with day jobs. Nestled in meadows, free range, but not completely, as some tending is required. Occasional field burns to keep them blooming in their places near those rows of corn, managed by men with big planters, big plans.

The Raccoon

LynetteLamp

You’re seeking a path of compassion as you hold the pistol, putting your face through paces of shifting sentiments. A large, tailless male lounges in the driveway in the middle of the day while the rest of his kind are tucked in tree dens. He stumbles like a drunk on a dance floor, lifts his languid head when you lob him with a snowball. When he turns, we notice the wound along his left flank. Dark dried blood, matted fur. He’s telling you it’s all right, making it easier to be resolute since you both want the same thing.

Lynette Lamp is a practicing family physician and recent graduate of the Spalding University MFA program. She has had previous poems published in JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association), The Pharos, Annals of Internal Medicine, Dermanities, Tipton Poetry Journal, and in The Healing Muse, Lynette lives in Winona, Minnesota.

Things Visible

MelissaA.Chappell

They dotted the fields, wafers cast from the blueing sky the cotton bolls. My father once told me that on the nickel-backed days of summer, he would pluck the fleecy white stuff from its mothering bur, tearing his hands. The melting sun brimmed with fire majestic, a silvered chalice pouring ironstone onto the boy’s back.

Blood on one hand, a nickel in the other, a red, sun-branded back, cirrus clouds, feathering the waning afternoon sky. All things visible. The hovering angels, rivers of wind, gravity and grace, the fathoms of love, all things invisible. Yet the boy, in his youth, considered only the cold, fizzling nectar of the Coca-Cola that lingered upon his tongue.

And he walked the tracks to his saltbox home in the light, wasting and tepid, of his crosshatch town.

Melissa Chappell is a poet residing in rural South Carolina, where she gains much inspiration from the forests, fields and wildlife. She is also an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She hopes to one day visit Spain in the Spring.

Community

JoeOppenheimer

Day dawns the poet arises wondering where the individual stops and the other begins. ‘If it takes a village?’ he muses then listens to the news

News comes on as the poet rises fighting raged in Gaza during the night and before he realizes the fright of the day the towns, the children, the sick his people destroy all takes his breath away and incites his pen to say things about his village, his people, that he would never have uttered before.

Joe Oppenheimer’s research on social justice and collective action problems is published and cited widely. He retired as a professor to write poetry and prose and has published poems, stories, and a play in various literary magazines. He lives in Maryland and has led writing groups in a homeless shelter and a VA hospital and has taught play writing. He has also selfpublished a short novella, 2 volumes of poetry, one of short stories and essays, and one of children stories. His website: joeaoppenheimer.wixsite.com/my-site.

Snow Day

ChristianWard

A blank notepad welcomed me when I woke, asking to fill it. The cookie cutter of my body made snow angels. I sledded in an old baby’s bathtub, the speed making me giddy as a horse trying to outpace the thawing sun. Made a council of snowmen, each scowling like my father. I returned to a house warm as freshly baked gingerbread, hot chocolate sparkly in my mouth. The notepad was full. The moonlit road empty as I walked past the snow-blinded memory, my hands numb with what could've been.

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Southword, Ragaire, Okay Donkey and Roi Faineant. Two collections available on Amazon and elsewhere: Intermission and Zoo.

Control

CLSSandoval

My therapist says it’s control that makes me anxious or rather the lack thereof

When I want to shout out contradictions to what others perceive of me

When I want to introduce myself with far too much backstory

When I want to be the one who puts away the dishes and the groceries and the laundry

When I want to take everything out of the closet to reorganize

When I write myself as the hero of all the stories in my head and on paper I want to control She says some of my coping is healthy and some isn’t

So I made an inventory a list of all I can control and all I can’t

We’ll see how long until I try to conflate both columns

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s presented at communication conferences, served as a poetry and flash editor, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, and both flash and poetry pieces in literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Radical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter, son, and dog with her husband in Walnut, California.

Laundry Night

AdenThomas

Monday night again. The laundromat smells like powdered soap and vodka. I'm here with the misfits, the poor, the street wanderers, the mentally ill.

Maybe I'm one of them now divorced, displaced, on the city’s edge, where the freeway noise drowns out the yelling.

I used to be different, or so I thought hidden behind a mortgage, a neat and tidy lawn, dinner at six.

Now, I watch as my new life spins in a beat-up dryer, wondering how much time I’ll lose trying not to be alone.

Outside, the night holds court for the forgotten and the foreign: they smoke and shuffle, trapped in their skin, watching me like I’m the one who’s lost.

Maybe I am learning to stand with the ghosts of my choices, no more crying wolfen, no more sleepwalking, just the rawness of me, spinning, spinning, spinning.

A Sketch Artist Turns Fifty

AdenThomas

Early in his hurried life he sketched his family into drawings of his friends; in turn, the faces of his friends he changed into the likeness of acquaintances. Acquaintances were blended into colleagues like clouds descending in their masks of fog.

How to sketch his colleagues then? He pondered the question with the tip of his charcoal pen. He judged the nature of his sullen art required that his colleagues be depicted in the shapes and shadows of his enemies, for his enemies were easiest to draw. His artistry went on this way for years, constant compositions in black and white, family, friends, and acquaintances converging until the day he realized he’d drawn them all as foes, and with no one left to hue, somewhere, someone began to blend him too.

Aden Thomas lives in South Dakota and has published widely in the last two decades. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has a book of poems published in 2017, entitled What Those Light Years Carry. He has recently returned to poetry after a five-year break where he focused on making a living at the expense of his poetry soul. It was a mistake. He is back for the remedy.

I Hear a Mockingbird at Midnight

GeorgeFreek

The stars that saw the pyramids built and the dinosaurs roam the earth, pay no attention to me, as time flows into a nothingness which we call eternity, and like an insidious disease, time destroys unseen. Was it for nothing then, that the Chinese sat beside their ancient rivers, studying venerable philosophies? From the passions of twenty-one to the sorrows of sixty-three is a short time in the history of mankind, and it seems even shorter to me.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous journals and reviews. His poem "Night Thoughts" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem "Enigmatic Variations" was also recently nominated for Best of the Net. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions. George Freek also published plays. His plays are published by Playscripts and Off The Wall Plays.

Tiny Pink Wooden Car

MercurySunderland

tiny pink wooden car doesn’t drive anymore. instead it sits on the shelf chipped from a childhood that doesn’t belong to me. who it could be i do not know. i only

can shrink myself down and drive down endless roads. i feel the breeze in my hair & suddenly driving isn’t so scary anymore. i hit the gas pedal & find myself swerving away from haphazard crashes. finding myself flying into the shelf ceiling & in this car i sit again. somehow after crash it just feels the calm of the lookout of a cliff where i plot my getaway. so i drive off & find myself crashing down. i land on my carpet & resize. the car shows no record other than the paint that weathers off. so i lie here wondering what i have done to drive & if i will ever get to be tiny again.

Mercury Sunderland (he/him) is an autistic gay trans man living in Seattle. He's been published by University of Amsterdam's Writer's Block, UC Davis' Open Ceilings, UC Riverside's Santa Ana River Review, and UC Santa Barbara's Spectrum.

Friends in High Places

MarySexson

When her father, so sick from chemo and radiation, inspires his daughter, who is in recovery, to reach out to her old dealer who can tell her what might cut the nausea or make him want to eat.

The juxtaposition of these needs, the starkness of who we know in this life, the dealer, the doctor, the healer, the friend who tells us that a bit of THC oil under his tongue can make a bowl of peaches more palatable, that he may not need to vomit when he’s done that this funny little bit of nature can actually help him to stomach it even as his body winces against the poisons he’s already swallowed.

Forecast

MarySexson

If I could just remember who I’ve told about this pain in my heart already, I wouldn’t need to worry anymore. I could ease myself down into the comfort of knowing some bit of sage advice will be given by someone, surely, along the way. A pep talk filled with coded euphemisms for loss and grief, or even some story that recounts their own journey and how they survived it. Maybe they can even tell me

how my future will go, how things will look on the other side of this sorrow.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Collective Consciousness

MarySexson

On the fifth of July when you finally surrendered to your broken heart its misfiring nodes its fibrillation its inability to keep up with you. When you finally let go of us and gave in stepped into the momentum of infinity itself just a figment of our collective consciousness laid out on a grid of what ifs and dreams.

You left us as quietly as a whisper your heart simply stopped, unable to generate any more longing for this world.

Mary Sexson lives in Indianapolis and is an award-winning poet with two full-length books and two collaborative chapbooks. Her newest full-length book is Her Addiction An Empty Place at the Table, (Finishing Line Press). Chatter House Press released her second collaborative chapbook, Marriage Maps and Driven Destinies, (October 2023). Her work has appeared in Alien Buddha, Flying Island Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Of Rust and Glass, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tipton Poetry Journal, and many other publications. Six of her poems are archived in the INverse collection of Hoosier Poets. Sexson has a Best of the Net and six Pushcart Prize nominations.

A smaller apartment

DSMaolalai

I've used all my best metaphors in poems about you and now I can't use them again. like boxing a move to a smaller apartment and leaving a lamp by the bins.

DS Maolalai is a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and, after some years abroad, currently lives in Dublin and and has been several times nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019), and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022).

The Dead Have More to Say

CharityEveritt

You weren’t there when we closed his eyes, when the technician gently wrapped the good old man my father, your husband of forty years, into a clean sheet and carried him away.

You were absent for weeks, trapped in bright rooms with visitor logs while my father folded himself into smaller and smaller packages and stopped asking for you.

You ask if I have “closure” – that dangerous idea we clutch like the bottom step of the last train leaving. I have heard of those who return to sit with the abandoned: a touch on the shoulder, a breath of lavender on the mirror,

as we turn suddenly and reach for a hand, smooth a place on the sofa, go to the kitchen for tea and lemon bars because our sentences are not finished.

Charity Everitt lives in Arizona and is retired following a career in technical writing and engineering software design and development. Her poems have appeared in Lyrical Iowa, River Heron Review, Comstock Review, Concho River Review, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Her first chapbook, Translation from the Ordinary, was published in 2023 (Finishing Line Press.)

Coma

SaraAbdelrahman

It’s hard to miss what a person in a coma looks like where they are put on a bed in a hospital, attached to numerous devices that keep them alive for as long as possible in hopes they would wake up one day. When they do, sometimes they tell stories about being aware of everything that happened around them, hearing and feeling everything, taking all these decisions, making all these plans, yet they couldn’t carry out any of them because their body was partially lifeless.

But what about those in the other type of coma? Where the opposite of all that I described above happens. Where a person looks very regular just like everyone around them, goes here and there, interacts with this and that, and comes back home after a long day, yet they don’t feel anything really. Their body, thank god, is fully alive, but their soul doesn’t feel anything, anything at all.

Sara Abdelrahman is a second-year PhD student in English Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She has written many non-fiction short essays and some poems in Arabic as well as in English.

MykytaRyzhykh

who is hiding in military uniform except children who lack something and children who are trying to take something away from them?

[This poem was first published in Unlikely Stories (www.unlikelystories.org)]

MykytaRyzhykh

The pig is warming himself Вy the stove as if he will never Вe baked for Christmas

[This poem was first published in Unlikely Stories (www.unlikelystories.org)]

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published any times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals Litсenter, Ice Floe Press and Soloneba, in the Ukrainian literary newspaper.

Regarding the Ohio-Indiana Border

LylanneMusselman

She asked, “Don’t you notice the change in aura when you cross from Ohio into Indiana?” “To the 1800s?” I joke. She laughs and swears the vibe is different. When crossing the state line, I looked hard for something mystical. Maybe a T. C. Steele stunning color of sky. A special feel to the air. For livestock looking healthier. Or happier.

I notice how at home I feel in both states –Ohio where my ancestors settled. Where I lived for five years, learning to love Buckeyes and Lake Erie. The Metroparks, Warbling Vireos, and the Walleyes. My native Indiana, where I grew up loving Redtail Hawks along the Mississinewa River, pink peonies, Wick’s sugar cream pie, scarlet cardinals, and frantic basketball. I consider my strong connections on both sides. Wonder if that’s why I never notice I cross the state line – back home, back home.

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and visual artist, living in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, Indianapolis Review, among others, and many anthologies. Musselman is the author of seven chapbooks, and author of the full-length poetry collection, It’s Not Love, Unfortunately (Chatter House Press, 2018). Her seventh chapbook, Staring Dementia in the Face from Finishing Line Press was published in July 2023.

Contributor Biographies

Sara Abdelrahman is a second-year PhD student in English Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. She has written many non-fiction short essays and some poems in Arabic as well as in English.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Charles Elin lives in Philadelphia and worked with the late writer/editor, Larry Fagin, from January 2012 until his death in 2017. Larry published a chapbook of his poems and stories in 2014. Then added two later stories to Larry’s 2016 magazine, The Delineator. Flash fiction pieces have been published by Columbia Journal, Corium Magazine and Midway. Charles’ poems have appeared in over a dozen literary journals, including Rosebud, Forge, Mantis. His latest chapbook is Orange Fanta. Mind what Comes and Goes is Charles’ first book of poems, published in 2024. He works as a psychiatric social worker in private practice.

Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 40odd of his poems appeared in literary journals, including Gargoyle, Cola Literary Review, The Moth, Tipton Poetry Journal, Anacapa Review, Masque & Spectacle, Constellations, and Juniper.

Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers and her first chapbook, Touring, was published in 2021. A second chapbook, The Late Hour, is forthcoming this spring (2025) from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Indianapolis and is active in the Indiana Writers’ Center and has taught both college writing and gifted education.

Ben Hyland lives in Florida. His poetry is collected in four chapbooks –most recently, Shelter in Place (Moonstone Press, 2022) – and has been featured in multiple journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hawai’iPacific Review, and Delta Poetry Review. As a career coach, he has helped hundreds of jobseekers find employment, even throughout the pandemic. Readers can connect and follow his work at www.benhylandlives.com.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Karen Laugel is a physician and emerging writer. She lives on the Delaware coast with her kayaks. Her poetry has appeared in Pen in Hand.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Joe Oppenheimer’s research on social justice and collective action problems is published and cited widely. He retired as a professor to write poetry and prose and has published poems, stories, and a play in various literary magazines. He lives in Maryland and has led writing groups in a homeless shelter and a VA hospital and has taught play writing. He has also self-published a short novella, 2 volumes of poetry, one of short stories and essays, and one of children stories. His website: joeaoppenheimer.wixsite.com/my-site.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Photo credit: Steve Kagan

Tipton Poetry Journal

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s presented at communication conferences, served as a poetry and flash editor, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three fulllength literary collections, three chapbooks, and both flash and poetry pieces in literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Radical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter, son, and dog with her husband in Walnut, California.

Mary Sexson lives in Indianapolis and is an award-winning poet with two fulllength books and two collaborative chapbooks. Her newest full-length book is Her Addiction An Empty Place at the Table, (Finishing Line Press). Chatter House Press released her second collaborative chapbook, Marriage Maps and Driven Destinies, (October 2023). Her work has appeared in Alien Buddha, Flying Island Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Of Rust and Glass, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tipton Poetry Journal, and many other publications. Six of her poems are archived in the INverse collection of Hoosier Poets. Sexson has a Best of the Net and six Pushcart Prize nominations.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Jim Tilley lives in New York State and has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, On the Art of Patience, was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Southword, Ragaire, Okay Donkey and Roi Faineant. Two collections available on Amazon and elsewhere: Intermission and Zoo.

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and several anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers’ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.