Tipton Poetry Journal #32

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.

This issue features 55 poets from the United States (20 states and the Territory of Puerto Rico) and one poet from India. 41 poets are making their first appearance in our pages.

We review Jeanine Stevens’ poetry collection, Inheritor, in this issue. Jeanine’s poetry has appeared in TPJ a few times, including two poems here in the Winter 2017 issue. Raised in Indiana, Jeanine now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

[TPJ considers reviews only if the author has previously been published in TPJ and if the book is recent.]

Beginning with 2016, print versions of Tipton Poetry Journal are available for purchase through amazon.com. The difference between the online and print versions is that interior images for the print version are not in color. So far Issues #29 and #30 are available from 2016. Issue #31 and #32 (this issue) should be available soon.

Barry Harris, Editor Tipton Poetry Journal Cover Photo, “Northern Cardinal in a Tree”

by Tony Campbell – stock.adobe.com #60618426 Copyright 2017 by the Tipton Poetry Journal.

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.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Contents Donna Pucciani ...................................................................1 Allison Thorpe ....................................................................2 Jeanine Stevens ..................................................................4 Lorne Mook.........................................................................6 Rebecca Weigold .................................................................7 Marianne Lyon ...................................................................8 James Owens ......................................................................9 Joannie Stangeland ...........................................................10 Richard King Perkins II .....................................................11 Stacy Post..........................................................................12 Amanda Negron ................................................................13 Tom Speaks .......................................................................14 CL Bledsoe .........................................................................16 Dominique Wilson .............................................................17 Elaine Palencia .................................................................18 Gerard Sarnat ..................................................................20 Henry Ahrens ....................................................................21 Jack Moody.......................................................................22 Milt Montague ..................................................................24 Akshaya Pawaskar ...........................................................24 Timothy Robbins ..............................................................26 Richard Alan Bunch ..........................................................27 Rich Ives ...........................................................................28 Keith Moul ........................................................................29 Kristina England ..............................................................30

Tipton Poetry Journal Mark Vogel .......................................................................32 Yvonne Morris ..................................................................33 Dan Jacoby........................................................................34 Steven Riel ........................................................................35 Maureen Tolman Flannery ...............................................36 Michael Keshigian ............................................................36 Thomas Locicero...............................................................38 Mark Trechock..................................................................39 Sergio A. Ortiz ..................................................................40 Karen June Olson .............................................................40 Rosemary Freedman ........................................................42 Daniel Holland .................................................................44 Jennifer Jussel ..................................................................46 H. W. Day .........................................................................48 Michael Meyerhofer .........................................................48 Joseph S. Pete ...................................................................50 Dan Baker .........................................................................51 Gloria Heffernan...............................................................52 Michael Estabrook ............................................................54 Michael H Brownstein ......................................................56 Sarah Rehfeldt ..................................................................58 Elizabeth Ehrlich ..............................................................58 Elena Botts .......................................................................60 Jack D. Harvey..................................................................61 Anum Kamran Sattar ........................................................64 Jennifer Jussel ..................................................................64 Alan Britt ..........................................................................66 Doris Lynch ......................................................................68 Tina Trutanich..................................................................70

Tipton Poetry Journal Rosemary Freedman .........................................................71 Review: Inheritor by Jeanine Stevens...............................72 Gene Twaronite.................................................................76 Douglas Macdonald ..........................................................77 Poet Biographies...............................................................78

Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal

Cardinal Donna Pucciani This wintry morning I shoveled solitude three inches deep distilled from cloud.

All was silent.

Trees stood, sentinels waiting for spring, watching the long pilgrimage through abiding grey, when sudden song transformed the big wild cherry tree.

Unable to find the cardinal, its crimson voice a smokeless fire in branch, twig, and space, I shifted whiteness with an old aluminum shovel, my frozen hands lifting and gathering invisible cherries, the far flute music flown from rooftops, the substance of red joy.

Donna Pucciani, Chicago-based writer, has published poetry on four continents in such diverse journals as Poetry Salzburg, Istanbul Literary Review, Shi Chao Poetry, Journal of Italian Translation, Acumen and Feile-Festa. Her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Japanese and German. In addition to five Pushcart nominations, she has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council and The National Federation of State Poetry Societies, among others. Her seventh and most recent collection of poems is Edges (Purple Flag Press, Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2016).

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Tipton Poetry Journal

A Government of Snow Allison Thorpe for Al Stewart A government of snow has raged across this peaceful countryside, white tongued filibuster gusting overrule, gristy congress of flakes, taxing even the most hospitable among us.

House pipes froze, ice snapped power lines, and the goats blared their displeasure to the moon.

It seemed all I did was carry firewood from shed to stove, dry out mittens and boots tainted with flurried propaganda.

I read your poems by the dance of candlelight, counting daffodils instead of sheep, trying to stay warm under such an oppressive regime, dreaming window boxes stuffed with ballots of spring.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

The Plumb of Forgetting Allison Thorpe Lose the string dangling a finger like some cheap party decoration or an innocent peasant in a de Maupassant story mask the gloom with zen-filled post-its waterfalls all spume and dazzle bypass brain aerobics and mnemonics rust and dust will be your friends blueberries ginko biloba salmon bury them in the yard one moon-bothered night scissor that white t-shirt you sleep in the one still keening the room of him then douse the velvet-wallowed darkness strike the remembered match

Allison Thorpe is a writer from Lexington, Kentucky. The author of several collections of poetry, she has recent work appearing or forthcoming in So To Speak, Pembroke Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Grasslimb Journal, Dying Dahlia, The Corvus Review, Bop Dead City, Crab Fat, and Yellow Chair Review.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Extinguished Stars Jeanine Stevens There is no end to even the simplest journey, especially at 2 am. Refreshed from four hours sleep and ready for a new route, I ruminate, what in the 60’s we called “monkey mind” in full gear up to its nightly games zipping convolutions, seeking useless scraps of information.

Did I lock the door?

Arranged for automatic deposit?

This is the hour for those past thirty.

Every time I try to narrow my intent, more scenarios appear. I focus on the alleyway I walked as a child, my version of counting sheep.

Fuchsia hollyhocks beam along back fences, trash cans sprayed with DDT stand open, faces of my teachers at School #43 appear: stern Mrs. Overheiser, Mrs. Stack and Mrs. Lloyd (the ones I learned the most from).

I see the backyard where boys played pirate, tied others to posts and lit them on fire.

Now, 4 a.m., keeping time, I try my mantras: Peace, One and Om. At the edge where the alleyway meets 37th St, I hesitate; realize how vast this matter, this chatter.

I’m confounded by my memory stream, reverse steps, sit in the middle next to a deep crack, ready to invest in new images.

Dreaded dawn leaks pale and slack through Venetian blinds.

This is the hour when the wind blows from extinguished stars.

Do you hear what I hear? A book of verse, (yeast rising) a loaf of bread. The morning paper slaps the porch: from my oven, aroma— warm cinnamon rolls with sultanas. ~with a few lines by Wislawa Szymborsko and Omar Khayyam.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Tabu Jeanine Stevens Late summer. I uproot tomato and radish, turn over for spring fodder, more than pungent, over-ripe, cruciferous.

Reminiscent of my parent’s vast double bed, their room warmer, the sheets softer.

Heavy odor I still can’t identify.

Sex, sweat, remnants of whiskey sours and buttered scallops, somehow a comfort.

And always perfume’s faint mystery: Tabu, its violin shaped bottle and 20 Carats, gold flecks resting on the bottom.

It seemed I was always on the edge of what was forbidden.

Now, looking again the ground up vegetables in uneven rows seem like brightest cloaks of red-lipped tulips.

Jeanine Stevens Jeanine Stevens studied poetry at UC Davis and CSU Sacramento. She has advanced degrees in Anthropology and Education. Her second poetry collection, Inheritor, was published by Future Cycle Press, 2016. Recent winner of the WOMR Cape Cod National Poetry Competition and the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. She just received her fourth Pushcart Nomination. Poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evansville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Journal, Verse Wisconsin, Stoneboat and others. Raised in Indiana, she now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Winter Solstice Lorne Mook Midway through the year’s longest darkness, I found myself unsettled and, walking out into a huddle of fourteen street lights and what seemed the windless air, looked up into a sky where over the moon the wind drove clouds like smoke— cigarette, coal, cigarette— and, close by, drove the mills of the windfarms I’ve driven by in the dark.

Breath-spun collectors of power for we who made them, firmly planted they stand— their lights blinking in unison— above my human concerns.

Lorne Mook teaches at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Some of his poems are gathered in his book Travelers without Maps. His translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems have appeared in journals and in his book Dream-Crowned, the first English translation of a collection that Rilke published in 1897 when he was 21.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Before you erect the tomb of our Oneness

Rebecca Weigold look at your hands. the hands that dote on my body like the laysan albatross on its mate are the callous hands forging a monument to our love. in the luggage you’ve packed for this flight are our fought-for meetings under the csx trestle, the flicker of our naked bodies by the light of kerosene heater, a poem you scribbled for me on a wine-stained napkin from the spy club. when i cut a lock of your hair as a keepsake how could i have known you were a terrorist prepared to sabotage our trip to Intimacy? the same hands that gifted mine with shakespeare steal from the joint savings, the same hands that lifted me to carry me through the door have planted explosives in our carry-on bag. we both thirst for the same water and though my skin is no different from yours you demand i drink from another fountain. you swill hemlock tea from monogrammed crystal before launching it as a missile at me. i stand engulfed in an air thick with the shards of our initials. before you took up your weapons there was a time you dove into the sea of my skin to look for treasure: what you brought back was a ring for your finger made of my bone. afraid this Oneness will die, you contemplate its murder. bury our love and you will erect a tomb where I will never visit.

I will cremate my pain with the fire of weeping and therapy.

And one day I will carry the ashes with me out to the edge of the pier and throw them into the trade winds that waft over the ocean I call Memories Timeless as Poetry.

Rebecca Weigold's poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, The Ekphrastic Review, BlazeVox, Winamop!, and The Skinny Poetry Journal. In 1987, she founded/published The Cincinnati Poets' Collective poetry journal which featured the work of national and international poets for nearly a decade. Rebecca lives in Kentucky.

(Photo courtesy of Roar Photography)

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Tipton Poetry Journal

The Winter Night Marianne Lyon An answer to Mary Oliver’s Poem: The Summer Day

You ask me who made the world the swan, the black bear.

You lavishly describe the intricate doings of a grasshopper’s life.

I intuit you believe idle time spent in a field with this magical insect is prayer.

You inspire me to confess what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life Mary, the night sky has dared me look up for eons of days too busy, my nose always in a book a new television series after dinner more poems to write words to gather cookies to bake sinks to clean I feel the night skies luminous world invite me on countless beaches but my eyes peer down like a lighthouse searching, gathering shells, pumiced rocks counting waves as they beat on shore Squealing when they grab my feet with cold tongues Once I felt her call me after an evening blizzard But it was too cold to step out into frosted air I chose a deep mulling, a fire, a wine instead The truth is Mary; the night sky fiercely beckons me purchase Great Courses on line a passionate coax to stream Cosmos available on Netflix She even invokes Catholic guilt to nag me look up.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Not immune to the calendar; I am ready in my nocturne years to emerge from the shadow of my home into her glistening field; lift my eyes; inhale her; see her say “Finally� with a pulsing wink

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 39 years.

After teaching in Hong Kong she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews such as Colere, Crone, Trajectory, Earth Daughters, Feile-Festa and Whirlwind. She spends time each year teaching in Nicaragua. She is a member of the California Writers Club and Healdsburg Literary Guild. She is an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in Vallejo, California.

After the First Snowfall James Owens Who might learn to read such foreign caligraphy, tangled pencil scrawl, knots of lace on snow?

--- There the crow disappeared behind a tree.

Here it came back.

James Owens' most recent collection of poems is Mortalia from FutureCycle Press.. His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connecticut River Review, Lime Hawk, and The Stinging Fly. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in central Indiana and northern Ontario.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

When I Am the Pie Girl Joannie Stangeland Pieces of me get sliced, served to husband, daughter, father, mother— a separate wedge for each.

Buttery, my crust crumbles, filling seeping into the tin.

Sometimes, a little too sweet.

Always I want to hoard the rest for me, to bolt each helping before it’s gone or—given quiet—savor every juicy bite, my own mouth berry-smeared.

Sometimes, orange or lemon zest, unexpected cinnamon, hint of ginger.

With ice cream, whipped cream, bourbon sauce, with coffee on a heavy china plate at a diner counter in a movie, on an Edward Hopper canvas, eaten standing by the sink, fork after fork, I am consumed.

Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring from Ravenna Press, plus three chapbooks. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Joannie lives in Seattle.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Magnitude Richard King Perkins II It ended when I could become no larger and began when I was less than a speck.

I am unrecognizable by machines of analysis and magnification.

Tomorrow, I will be a galaxy but at this moment I’m a remote scintillation.

Tomorrow, I will be the sound of worlds colliding but I’m just a rubbing of grass blades at this time.

Between now and then there will be books unread and compliments never given.

Stories I forgot to share.

Between now and then there will be one side of the bed gone cold, an ancestor’s name mentioned for the last time.

Intimacies that never happened.

These are what I try hardest to remember.

Growth is not an adding to— growth is a taking away.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Entertaining Sadness Stacy Post I walk the lonely hour, whittle my body down to fatigue to ease into slumber later.

Miles from home, the weight of winter air leans heavy on my shoulders.

Frost nicks my cheeks, urges my steps to quicken yet I slow down.

Let this darkness swallow me whole.

Let it take my loneliness and feed it to the night animals who skulk around barren trees and the razor shorn corn stalks.

Let the restless wind carry my beleaguered body all the way to the open endless ocean, so warm waves can wash my briny bones clean.

Yet it is night in the heart and the ocean exists imaginably far.

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Tipton Poetry Journal I trudge onward watching for eager eyes to glow in shifting shadows.

My leaded steps drift and puncture pristine snow.

Stacy Post is a Midwestern writer in multiple forms. Her poetry chapbook, Sudden Departures, debuted with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Quail Bell Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Flying Island, Midwestern Gothic, Pearl, Iodine Poetry Journal and others. A Pushcart Prize nominee for short fiction, her stories have appeared in CHEAP POP, Boston Literary Magazine, moonShine review, Fiction365, Referential Magazine and others. Her short plays have been produced in festivals around the U.S. She works as a librarian by day and resides in the Indiana heartland. www.stacypost.com

Mother Amanda Negron Monsters are real And they sleep in our beds and eat at our dinner tables Monsters are made of flesh and blood And they look like the ones we love I never knew Mother was a monster Until she cooked up dinner one day And on the plate was my own still beating heart Every night she served a part of me on her platter Whilst I grew thinner and thinner And it was only bad at first But by the fourth time, it felt like home Amanda Negron was the victim of severe child abuse at the hands of her mother and was removed by social services as a teenager. She writes poetry about her experiences with abuse to share with others. Now 23 years old and living in Maryland, Amanda has a BA in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is working on her first novel about abuse.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Cheese Flat Tom Speaks When I was a little boy, grandpa once told me a joke about coons, And I didn't understand what he had against raccoons, I always thought they were cute.

I told my mother the joke, and she had a talk with grandpa.

He's sitting at the dinner table now, his walker with the tennis ball feet.

He's a World War II Marine.

And I remember 'Japs' discussed at the Thanksgiving table.

As a small boy, I asked, "Grandpa, did you kill Japs?"

My mom scolded me. But come to think of it, he never answered.

I know he saw friends die.

When shipped home from some south pacific hell hole, it was because of jungle rot.

Jungle rot is, well, when your skin rots off in the jungle.

With the humidity and filth, a quarter of his skin just peeled away.

I whisper to my wife, "Grandpa doesn't like Mexican. He won't eat quesadillas."

She raises her eyebrows, and I know grandpa’s getting quesadillas.

Grandpa is a bona fide card carrying member of the greatest generation, heroic deeds and intolerable prejudices.

The greatest generation's greatest contradiction.

I want to tell him to be more open-minded, but I've never had jungle rot.

My deepest physical suffering, was that one time at summer camp when I squatted in a bush, and got poison ivy on my ass.

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Tipton Poetry Journal So I slide the quesadilla before grandpa.

"What's this," he asks.

"A cheese flat, grandpa."

"A cheese flat, what's that?"

"You know, American cheese grilled between thin slices of wheat bread."

"Oh," Grandpa says, He bites with a wrinkled smile, "This cheese flat is delicious."

Tom Speaks is a professional speaker, historical fiction author, and writer of poetry, history and philosophy. He is the co-founder and co-owner of The Impact Group (www.IGPR.com). a public relations and marketing firm. He lives in Hudson, Ohio with his wife and two children.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

The Gold Mine CL Bledsoe Signs exist for a reason. This one, a massive once-white painted piece of plywood, full of potshots no one had heard zip into the wood, sagged above the levee holding the water in the big stock pond we called The Lake. Maybe it said No Hunting, maybe some kind of warning, but my sister got it in her head it marked the now-collapsed entrance to a gold mine. She’d heard there was a mine not too far away, and if the president won’t tell the truth about what was found on the dark side of the moon, why would anyone admit a spur of precious metal rested just underneath our pasture? The plan was to convince me and our cousin Scott to dig. Or course, we were all too young for shovels, so we used spoons.

We dug for hours, found a shark’s tooth and no gold. After three days, mom was getting mad about the dirty spoons and forbade us from going back over by the pond. My sister had a new plan: to dig a pool in the front yard, line it with trash bags. Maybe we’d strike oil.

CL Bledsoe is an assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of fourteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray's Sea World. Originally from rural Arkansas, he lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

when pigs fly Dominique Wilson When pigs fly, Those hoggish cherubs will put the storks out of work They’ll hold onto our babies with their coiled tails The bees will die.

Standing on the shoulders of giants will be enough no longer.

Nor will we longer feel the clouds beneath us massaging our toes They won’t learn how to walk like the rest of us They’ll clutter the sky with their bacon feathers and pollute our stars politely. They'll make us learn pork instead of poultry and Their logic instead of our poetry.

Smh, a bunch of bohemian mammoths They will air bathe their hooves with luxury.

We’ll be forced to drench them in iodine to prevent swine flu.

They are rapists.

A wall must be made A big wall. A huge wall.

An epic wall.

Dominique Wilson is a college student from New York at Coppin State University in Maryland. Her poem, How to Survive a Witch (published in TPJ Summer 2016), was one of our nominees for the 2016 Pushcart Prize.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Too Much To Tell Elaine Palencia Mother, So much has happened since you died.

The Dodge Dart is back.

Daddy remarried at ninety and disinherited me.

Then he died.

I am older than you were when you retired and said Now it will be summer all the time.

Sunny days have grown fewer.

Did you take some with you?

You have two more grandchildren, both boys.

The early deaths of the family males are balancing out.

Since my last birthday I’ve been wearing your legs and often your smile.

I keep your urn in the living room beside the schefflera.

Don’t worry about me like you always did.

I try to stay upbeat.

The Waffle House still serves that good sausage and they say that in grasslands reclaimed from strip mining the short-eared owl is thriving.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Caregiving in the House of the Longtime Invalid Elaine Palencia We are firefighters checking the hoses polishing the truck cooking chili hour after hour after hour until suddenly the invalid bursts into flames again and in seconds the fire is in the walls attic, basement and you ask yourself if it’s more important to save the burning man or his family until a noise leads you to find them all huddled together in a closet locked from the inside singing.

Elaine Fowler Palencia is the book review editor of Pegasus, the journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a member of the Quintessential Poets of ChampaignUrbana, Illinois. Her work has received six Pushcart Prize Nominations. She has fiction forthcoming in the Pikeville Review.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Kellyanne Conway’s Gaslit RTs Gone Ugly

Gerard Sarnat “Oh baby, said we gotta go I said me gotta go now Let's hustle on outta here Let's go!”

-- Louie Louie, The Kingsmen

3AM, pitch black except for flickering LED screens, the First Among Equals Valet retweets sound-bitten alt-truth Twaiku monologues to Her Trumpian Sun King, Sire, Queenie’s laboring in Mar-a-Lago’s delivery suite to extend HRH fiberoptics to The White House Winter Palace. After which our mighty Humpty Trumpity blond ducktailed old troll who often beds loyal divine paramours behind gathering clouds, screams at no tool in particular, Fools, quit streaming inside My soiled Velveteen Rabbit pajamas or I’ll banish you to teach BS 101 at Moscow’s Stalin campus of Trump U! This is our 3rd year Februaring & Marching in Longboat Key FLA. Friends from South Bend are in the area.

We socialize a few times per week. So far we have seen 3 plays + 3 concerts & drive 3 hours to see The President’s place!

Gerard Sarnat MD has been nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. He lives in California and has authored Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting the Ice King (2016) which included work published in Gargoyle and Lowestoft. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s Kaddish for the Country for distribution as a pamphlet on Inauguration Day 2017 and as part of the Washington/nationwide Women’s Marches. Gerry’s built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Med professor.

GerardSarnat.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Moments of Silence Henry Ahrens The trains used to run yelling and screaming, thundering through the valley.

Now they have stopped.

Nothing moves.

The silence creeps up the hillsides like an apologetic prodigal: “Here I am.

I have nothing, but I need somewhere to stay.”

My brother’s shoes sit on the bare wood floor, not squeaking or clomping up the stairs.

They are empty.

He stays here no more, and though I lean up from the pillow to hear him, he is gone into the silence that is the trains not running.

[This poem is a revised version of a poem originally published in From the Edge of the Prairie.]

Henry Ahrens is a graduate of St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana. He teaches a variety of high school English classes in Cincinnati, Ohio. His work has appeared in Pudding Magazine and From the Edge of the Prairie, an annual anthology published by the Prairie Writers’ Guild based in Rensselaer.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

simply beautiful Jack Moody how do I explain this? sometimes I see things that are so gentle so innocent so beautiful in their simplicity that I am stricken with a sickening feeling of guilt and melancholy I’ve lived inside a realm of darkness and spite and paranoia for so long that when I witness these moments of purity I am suddenly reminded of how black and evil the world sometimes isn’t. and I feel terrible for forgetting that. tonight, as I walked down the street towards the bar I’ve visited far too many times I looked to my right into one of the buildings lining the pavement in it, were two elderly women sitting together on rocking chairs and knitting just sitting in a warm room together, knitting. at that moment, I felt a swirl of nausea rush through my body and held back the sudden urge to cry.

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true romance Jack Moody alone on the corner barstool chasing whiskey with beer I overhear a young couple a seat down from me talking about the show toddlers in tiaras "it's everything wrong with society today!" the young man shouts "those people are the worst of humanity, and we give them a show!" the young lady laughs subtly I suspect that she watches the show and now holds a secret it must be their first date now they both laugh uncomfortably I think the young man reached the same conclusion I did he scrambles to change the subject "so, who are you voting for?" "oh, I don't know," says the lady "let's not talk about that." cue the collective uncomfortable laughter followed by silence. the young man goes for it "Well, I'll just say this," don't do it, man don't do it.

"I would never vote for trump or anything, but that clinton bitch is corrupt as a mob boss.� silence. the young lady is voting for clinton the silence continues far too long for that not to be the case the young man clears his throat the both of them look down and drink their beers better luck next time kids

Jack Moody is a short story writer, poet and freelance journalist from wherever he happens to be at the time. He has had work published in Down in the Dirt Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Round Up, CC&D Magazine and Southern Pacific Review, with work forthcoming in Brick Moon Fiction. He didn't go to college. He likes his privacy.

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the manbird Milt Montague he awoke to discover his arms had grown into two huge wings flapping them experimentally then more vigorously rising unsteadily above the ground after a few minutes up, up into the air past the trees playfully zooming in all directions exuberantly slicing through the air that pushed him upward into the clear sky above higher and higher Icarus here he comes there were no restraints he could go anywhere was free as a bird

Milt Montague was born and raised and lives now in New York City. He survived The Great Depression, the school system, and World War ll. Back to finish college, marry and help raise 3 lovely daughters. After many years as an independent business person, retirement and back to college, spent 20 years of reveling in knowledge, then discovered writing at 85. Now at 90 plus he has 98 poems and 15 brief memoirs published in 35 different magazines, so far‌..

Last Act Akshaya Pawaskar Play dead to a bear and lie with your face down to save your bowels.

How we have to be alive and dead at the same time, The woods taught us that.

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Tipton Poetry Journal But dying is the only sure act done with certitude in a life full of toss a coin options, like an artist, we create perfect death.

Like an air fern we don’t revive and sprout green.

We stuff cotton balls in our nose and nullify its probability.

Lazarus resurrects Not we, not us.

We just lie supine Lids too small to cover what we have seen.

And that knowledge Writ in the eyeball Decomposes under sun and water to nothingness, to finality.

That feeling when the chair next to you always warm and familiar feels empty A sense of gaping void and nausea overcomes.

The bear sniffs and is gone.

Akshaya Pawaskar is an Indian and doctor by profession and dabbles in poetry. Her poems are published in EFiction India, Writer’s Ezine, Ink drift, Poetry superhighway, Indian ruminations and anthologies byLost Tower Publications. Akshaya lives in western India.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Marc Eisdorfer Timothy Robbins The summer before he died he hitched to Oregon and back, returning with a pack of Andy Griffith trading cards from a general store in Idaho.

He was interested because he was from North Carolina and like Barney Fife he had a middle name that kept changing.

He praised the sense of community but pointed out that in Mayberry no one was black, no one was queer, the poor stayed in the hills, no mention of Chapel Hill with its educated Jews.

That summer he seemed healthy, house-sitting for a Guatemalan refugee hospitalized with a brain parasite; bringing me thermoses of miso and tofu after my hernia repair.

He talked endlessly about Micky, how after Micky left he would lie in bed smelling the sheets.

No new episodes and no foreseeable end of syndicated reruns.

When I was back on my feet we took the Guatemalan’s truck to the lake.

Marc named thirty birds by sound alone.

Timothy Robbins teaches ESL and does freelance translation in Wisconsin. He has a BA in French and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Indiana University. He has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His poems have also appeared appeared in Three New Poets, Long Shot, The James White Review, Evergreen, Off The Coast, Slant, Main Street Rag and various small zines.

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Tipton Poetry Journal

Wintriest Peach Richard Alan Bunch In the exegesis of daily things, even those fluent in wintriest peach, we know there’s a kingfisher on every shore among the rasp and cough of blood and wave.

As a goat nibbles on a lord of piffles’ wallet, we see a sign that reads GOOD EATS near sunflowers that follow the sun under my arm.

Near the riprap of wet rocks where fishers with black dragon tattoos angle for sea bass and salmon, currents marry breakers that splat and foam-pop on the sand.

Richard Alan Bunch is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of several collections of poetry, including Concert by Blue Moonlight, A Sausalito Moon, Santa Rosa Plums, and Dancing in the Cool Morning Light. His poetry has appeared in Windsor Review, Poetry New Zealand, Hurricane Review, Poem, Hawai’i Review, Many Mountains Moving, Red River Review, Slant, Homestead Review, Dirigible, Tipton Poetry Journal, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, West Wind Review, Comstock Review, and the Oregon Review. His latest work is titled Kottenmouth and Other Poems of Love.

He resides with his family in Davis, California.

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Immigrant Blues Rich Ives I went to the store to buy some friendly foreign countries, but I suddenly realized that I’m the only one who notices how far I am away from myself I can get. I put my discovery on the clothesline, and I waited for it to fill.

There’s a job I attend to while I’m resting, but if I go down inside what I’m thinking, I could drown. There’s a bloom on the water that covers little parts of the anticipation.

Often I’m less certain of myself than weather because it’s cold inside a foreigner, but me, I’m unpredictable and change as often as the kiss of vagrant air on the rooftops.

Every thought I have has at least three sides, but sometimes one side folds itself into another and gets foolishly stronger like that time I lit myself on fire.

Of course I believe I can think somewhat aggressively, which makes me potentially brilliant and ashamed and leads to more powerful mistakes as well as alterations of the reality of others less disciplined in their thinking. My father was once eight years old, but I never saw him wearing trapdoor pajamas or questioning the buttons that held him in.

I keep on throwing myself out of the way until I realize I’m out of the way. So I pour my father a cupful of thank you and sweeten it with a wink of complicity, as if I know what he’s been up to. His depression clings adorably. I tell the truth sometimes when I’m trying to sound inventive,

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Tipton Poetry Journal and my sincerity waits for me to catch up and to mean it as much as I seem to.

Sooner or later I’ll have to stop and settle for where I am.

Rich Ives is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His books include Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a prose work for each day of the year (Silenced Press), Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, (Newer York Press), Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, (Bitter Oleander Press), and a story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books). Rich lives in Washington State.

Warning Keith Moul The plain reacts slowly. It has painful geology.

So when you enter, you get to know it quickly And well. No bell sounds warning of arrival, As if people on the plain do not know. Take This as counsel: if known you may be welcome Or if known for certain unsavoriness you won’t.

Visitors unfamiliar with local ways may as well Be unfamiliar with the Big Dipper or North Star; They may be too ignorant to understand privacy, Or freedom, or the ways of Providence. Natives Here know meaningful sites along a creek; hills Where the vision can wander, explore the skies; Clouds that often accompany families for years.

If you assumed these things about us, why ask?

Keith Moul’s poems and photos appear widely. He received his MA from Western Washington and his PhD from the University of South Carolina. He now lives in Port Angeles, Washington. Finishing Line released his chapbook, The Future as a Picnic Lunch in 2015. Aldrich Press published Naked Among Possibilites in 2016 and accepted No Map at Hand for 2017. Finishing Line will publish Investment in Idolatry early in 2017.

Photo Credit: Ianthe Moul

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Cormorant in Wickford Marina Kristina England Long-winged emperor stands on mooring ball.

Head cranes to listen for pattering of fish on bay, flares arms to dry them a bit, preens with beak.

Morning dew clings to sailboat.

I try not to slip, no railings to catch woman overboard.

Yesterday, lost more people at work, budget cuts, skeleton crew, gaunt roosters crowing at each other.

Turf is turf, no matter how small.

Sailing buddy worries for friend, new boss threatened by strong breasted birds, corners woman, wants her to fly the coop.

Rig boat, leave hunger of rush hour commute, lone cormorant on his mooring.

Wonder if he tires too, not of the morning sun, but the other cormorants stealing his gosh darn fish.

I mean, where is the order in it all?

Motor back at sunset, wildlife gone, roads emptied by Friday, another restless week bound to return.

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There’s a spider in my basement Kristina England Came across her while vacuuming, her legs grasping a white sac as if to say, "This is mine."

Children silk-affixed to treadmill would jam the hose anyway.

I watch her lift her whole body over the nest. She knows I am processing the situation.

What she doesn't understand is thoughts are so unpredictable.

I envy her those one hundred babes, suck up cobweb instead, leave her to cradle her life.

Kristina England is a writer and photographer residing in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in several magazines, including Apeiron Review, Five 2 One Magazine, Gargoyle, Silver Birch Press, and Zoomoozophone Review. She can be followed on facebook at http://facebook.com/kristinaengland .

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If we loved ourselves Mark Vogel If we loved ourselves, or even if we didn’t hate ourselves, would we be able to destroy our home?

- Derrick Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe)

With a whisper a library message two generations old melds with refined dust, though ancient histories don’t travel well, for pettiness is ubiquitous, like a wardrobe covering securely labeled lives. Most here know what photo-shopped beauty should be, though for insurance we carry vitas tattooed with pop genealogy, saying we are still young as hell.

In our travels we choose what we wish to see, though the farm is gone, flattened into a running path, the barn burned, the black and white cows carted off.

We protest that we had no hand in destroying the old trails through the woods, or in straightening the creek once heading snake-like to the river. None of us purposely poisoned the Great Mother flow a thousand miles long, or desired the sepia group portrait painting smiles over past deeds. It wasn’t us, surreptitious, who heaved glossy porno from the humid late night car window, then sipped alone at a pint bottle. Instead, we create science fiction, as we pretend to live without a body, and see the dream once believed like scripture.

But even with faces averted, there is no denying the childhood creek bubbles with soap, the mud is tangled with plastic bags. No denying the wet glued pages— the image of slick naked legs wide open. For while we were away the home of the birds was re-landscaped, then paved. The vines and jungle were obliterated for high rise dorms for the new hordes.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Though we reject the possibility the sacred path has been tainted, it is hard to believe cooler worlds exist elsewhere, linked by water and green corridors stretching to the horizon. We grasp at innocence immersed in the ancient map. We long ago retreated to library quiet, where words long etched in the hard surface read like an alien language.

Mark Vogel has published short stories in Cities and Roads, Knight Literary Journal, Whimperbang, SN Review, and Our Stories. Poetry has appeared in Poetry Midwest, English Journal, Cape Rock, Dark Sky, Cold Mountain Review, Broken Bridge Review and other journals. He is currently Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and directs the Appalachian Writing Project.

Calli makes a call Yvonne Morris Hey, it’s me. Well I called him last night. And I was like—and he was like whatever—and I was like uuuhhhh.

Seriously, say anything you want to me—that’s why I called.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you get to Philly— It does matter if you get to Vegas. Seriously.

I can’t believe they’re letting her teach the summer program. I’ve been saying I wanted to do it forever. Yes, last night. Can you believe it? He acts like he wants me to give up my life for him. I have a family to think about.

My kids have a life of their own now. Yes, he calls me a couple of times a week.

We’re not serious. I don’t want to get remarried—but he’s fun and he’s company.

That’s all—we’re just having fun. And I know that’s all I want—which is fine.

Yvonne Morris works as a writing instructional specialist and adjunct instructor in communications at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Her first chapbook, Mother was a Sweater Girl, was published in 2016 by The Heartland Review Press.

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silent drums (epitaph for a rock drummer) Dan Jacoby san francisco mid sixties psychedelic renaissance played free shows on flatbed trucks in the panhandle, golden gate park crowds on revolutionary edge music the foundation, catalyst never lost the dream community fueled by rock and roll punctuating social distress hard driving surreal anthems lsd blues music a lifting spirit makes humanity, better even existing outside the pale surfers shack on mars mad epic ideas never stopped creating to recreate nirvana nothing subtle nothing could kill him as long the music played to an audience that listened

Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, Chicago State University, and Governors State University. He has published poetry in Anchor and Plume Press/Kindred Magazine, Arkansas Review, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Bombay Gin, Burningword Literary Review, Canary, Indiana Voice Journal, Common Ground Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, The Opiate, and Red Fez to name a few. He is a former educator, steel worker, and army spook. He lives in Illinois and is a member of the Carlinville Writers Guild. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015. He is currently looking for a publisher for a collection of poetry.

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Cowbird Steven Riel Who taught you to be a good parent?

Maybe you aim to stash your eggs with a strict, upstanding clan?

Maybe like God you give Mary and Joseph temporary custody, never intending to forsake your seed.

Your victims, type-A warblers, wound up tight by need-to-feed, have no time to play favorites, spy and spear inchworms, fatten up big-mouth broods like clockwork, fling fecal sacs overboard with no-nonsense gusto, rush husky fledglings off to school.

Meanwhile you devote a whole lifetime to keeping tabs on squabbling, shithead siblings and cousins who flock beside convenience stores, jockey in the median like it’s a trading floor, peck at cigarette butts and scratch tickets, cut in line to squawk last-second Keno bets.

Maybe your monk’s brown cowl keeps you from devolving into a complete and utter blackbird. Maybe you wonder if the squatter you left behind weep-cheeps.

Maybe once your gang settles down for shut-eye and the moon’s white cup rises, you ache to cheer your chick’s egg-tooth, wish you had witnessed her wobbly first flight, or maybe not.

Steven Riel is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House Press, 2014), as well as three chapbooks, the most recent of which, Postcard from P-town, was selected as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and several periodicals, including International Poetry Review and The Minnesota Review. Steven lives in Massachusetts.

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Billy Tipton and the Undertaker Maureen Tolman Flannery Billy Tipton, chaste as his need, carried his secret to the astonished home of the undertaker.

Nude to the rude intruder, Death, no longer able to jazz her gender, she lay her truthful body down while all the riffs trailed out into the late improvisational night of Billy Tipton’s androgyny.

Maureen Tolman Flannery grew up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Wyoming and lives in Chicago where she is an English teacher, wood-carver and Home Funeral Guide. Among her eight books are Tunnel into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Ancestors in the Landscape. Her poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, North American Review, Xavier Review, BorderSenses, Birmingham Poetry Review, Calyx, Pedestal, Poetry East, Atlanta Review. Arroyo, Comstock Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern.

Winter Misery Michael Keshigian He despised winter, abbreviated days when night, without remorse, invaded the sanctity of afternoon, when children disembarked the late school bus with flashlights that blinded the fading sidewalks.

It drove him to reclusiveness, even from his wife, who morphed into a turtle, her head barely popped from layered sweat shirts and socks for the price of warmth now that the sun had taken leave.

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Tipton Poetry Journal She huddled habitually in the corner of the couch, more blankets over her legs, reading newspapers by the single lamp that drove its light into the heart of 5 PM darkness, his meals cold even before they reached the folding table, eaten in front of the television that offered little more than sophomoric comedies followed by the day’s diet of human disaster and a weather forecast best delivered by a child.

But what unnerved him most was to go to bed each night in their nearly refrigerated second level room and watch her whispers shape to a vapor cloud that projected against the night light and happily acknowledge the existence of Him, along with thanks and the blessings He bestowed.

Michael Keshigian’s twelfth poetry collection, Into The Light, will be released this Spring by Flutter Press. His other published books and chapbooks include: Inexplicable, Beyond, Dark Edges, Eagle’s Perch, Wildflowers, Jazz Face, Warm Summer Memories, Silent Poems, Seeking Solace, Dwindling Knight, Translucent View. Published in numerous national and international journals, he is a 6- time Pushcart Prize and 2-time Best Of The Net nominee. His poetry cycle, Lunar Images, set for Clarinet, Piano, Narrator, was premiered at Del Mar College in Texas. Subsequent performances occurred in Boston (Berklee College) and Moleto, Italy. Winter Moon, a poem set for Soprano and Piano, premiered in Boston. Michael lives in New Hampshire. http://michaelkeshigian.com.

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Between Two Days Thomas Locicero (For Lisa)

It is often the difference between two days that changes a life, bludgeons an imagination.

On Christmas Eve eve, my sister believed.

On Christmas Eve, she overheard our sister tell our father that our presents had been stolen.

Our father did not mention Santa Claus, only that he didn’t have any more money to spend.

So that was that. We children did what we could— what could I do at ten?—to make magic for a six year old, whose head was aswim with lies and disappointment meant for those locked in holy matrimony, like our parents.

At seventeen, she learned she was dying, something she did religiously until forty-five.

Stargazing in Oklahoma Thomas Locicero There was a light that seemed to some a permanent fixture, though, a face in a stadium of stars, it did not stand out, cannot be named by gazers like us, and now it is gone, a missing button on a black blouse, a faraway flame doused by the wet tips of God’s fingers or, perhaps, it was absorbed and assigned to light another darkness. Its loss is perceived here as if untouched, much like a drought in California or the death of a stranger’s child.

Thomas Locicero is an award-winning poet, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a playwright and monologist. His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Boston Literary Magazine, The Long Island Quarterly, Riverrun, Omnibus Arts & Literature Anthology, The Good Men Project, A&U: America's AIDS Magazine, and Beginnings. Originally from East Islip, Long Island, Thomas resides with his wife, Lil, and their sons, Sam and Ben, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

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Dead Ducks Mark Trechock Out moving cattle to the south pasture, the woman who inherited the farm also took possession of a mallard drake waddling under a coat of oily slime.

“Must have took a reserve pit for a pond,” she said.

“I hate to see a critter suffer more than I hate the Fish and Game.”

She cleaned it up and fed it in the shop and let it go the next day, live or die.

It flew, but not before her sister took her picture with it on her cell phone.

The county paper ran it the next Friday.

“Now they’ll make me a tree hugger,” she moaned.

“Before this boom ends,” I told Jay, “a lot more ranchers may be hugging trees.”

Jay’s long-term weather outlook is stuck on global warming for generations with daily natural disasters of burning or freezing, depending on the direction of the ocean currents.

“More likely we’ll all be dead ducks,” he said.

Mark Trechock is director of a community organizing effort in western North Dakota. Recently, his poems have appeared in such journals as Red Wheelbarrow, Radius, Kudzu House, Shark Reef Passager and Triggerfish.

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Bengal Elephant Sergio A. Ortiz When he dreams about himself he takes on the body of an angry elephant.

Sometimes he chases himself out of the dream and wakes up scared, by my side.

I have the rest of night to become invisible in his shadow. The life he leaves me in that wilderness is sad and growing.

Sergio A. Ortiz is the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. 2nd place in the 2016 Ramón Ataz Annual Poetry Competition sponsored by Alaire publishing house. He lives in Puerto Rico and is currently working on his first fulllength collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

In Our Town Karen June Olson For Flint, Michigan On the five o’clock news the mayor drinks a glass of water to disprove his crooked teeth and says, trust us, the water is safe.

Underground, pipes crumble and lead spews from park fountains and every home faucet.

In our town water is drawn from the river and we believed they were telling the truth.

The truth is corrosive thinking.

Don’t drink the water.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Every schoolchild knows the chemical makeup of water.

In our town, water is a cocktail mixed with enough poison to unwire a child’s developing brain, cause skin rashes to bleed and form scabs that will not heal.

Mothers see scalp shine clean as kids lose hair by the fistfuls.

Don’t use the water.

What is the real color of water?

In our town, water looks like urine and smells like sewer.

Calculate the numbers of bottled water it takes to do a load of clothes, fill a bathtub, or wash dishes.

Maybe this is our demise.

Like clouds, we’ll float belly up, nourish waterways polluted by industry’s decay, drift with fish that fin sideways, unable to navigate, offset by something unknown.

Correction– known.

We drank the water.

Karen June Olson lived the first half of her life in Michigan and currently resides in Missouri. Her poems have appeared in 2River, The Mas Tequila Review, UCity Review, and Third Wednesday. She is professor emerita in early childhood education and is writing her first collection of poetry.

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At the Intersection of Cornell and Harvard Rosemary Freedman I keep stepping up to the curb, and looking out in all directions like a girl whose bus is running late.

Thinking about the novel of you, and in you, and what character I have been assigned— You say you might want to be held all day and I would say to you that I am the type of girl who would hold a man all day.

I wait for you to exit your Greek tragedy— and come to a different imperfect world, yet welcoming like an old roommate—familiar as longing—site unseen—your joke about cooties in the seventh grade and how you suspect you might’ve had them— provides me direction into your sense of humor like an old flashing bulb sign luring me in— Here, in this world, we are the mythical creatures and we worship each other, and that is sufficient— And at night we transform into pillars supporting each other like the white columns of old mansions—and being a diploma whore and a mythical character— I will say that your credentials are like a heated blanket that I wrap myself in contentedly while we laugh at each other and ourselves, and you play the guitar and the mandolin and the keyboard for me while I write songs for you and compose poems And imagine the little girl of me Slicing myself in two, like a fish just getting cleaned revealing the most vulnerable parts and the brilliance of you like a magical surgeon all scrubbed in, examining those parts and finding them healthy enough, placing them back inside and suturing the pieces with precision.

The little boy of you imagined me a life-time ago but you were distracted, and now you find me like a welcoming mother and I gather the little boy of you to my chest and you find a peace there, like when the birds first welcome the morning. A quiet quality you have sought.

I wait patiently reflecting on the words of a local poet who commented on my poems Sunday night— “There were some great lines there,”

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Tipton Poetry Journal And I think great lines are the ones where When you’re in a hurry there are no other customers And you have the cashier who has worked there fifteen years— Or where when you’re bored, you have the cashier who has a PhD in Spanish Literature who speaks to you in a foreign language quoting Neruda in the original and though you barely comprehend It is like a treasure you can never lose—but that’s not the kind of lines he meant— Anyway—I step out now looking for my bus and you pull up In some earthy type ride, I imagine, And lean toward me with the passenger window half-way down And I recognize you immediately, And from that point forward we begin our travel together.

Rosemary Freedman was born the youngest of 7 children on the West side of Indianapolis and now lives in nearby Carmel. She has 7 children and works as a Nurse Practitioner providing psychotherapy and pain management primarily for cancer patients at a major hospital. She and her husband Jack have been married for 7 years. Rosemary gardens and has a lot of perennials. She collects peonies and feels in about three years many of the new ones she planted will mature. She also collects iris and allium. When younger, Rosemary studied poetry but stepped away from it for many years. Half-way through a doctoral program she decided she would rather spend her time writing poetry than writing 150 page papers that few if anyone would ever read.

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Ficus Daniel Holland There are moments like now when I want to ditch this job and wonder if I could become the boss’s ficus tree that slouches too-tall like Eleanor Roosevelt by the big wide window weathering the shame of being present for this my umpteenth reproach knowing such trials will likely never happen to her since ficus trees are seldom yelled at and have no deadlines to miss But eventually would come another long downlit night after a brief cameo by the other-worldly loud and laughing receptacle-thumping cleaning crew and the re-abandoned benjamina would find herself alone after-hours once again yearning unexplained for that grim company of her harsh despotic daytime office mate with her twisted conviction that even he has redeeming and fertile qualities because ficus trees too can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and end up admiring the wrong people If only enlightened by the two small nature spirits seen one night while they danced their unabashed dance in the office parking lot she might break free from her root-bound compliance and enlist with her braided comrades summoned to what they all knew was their pièce de résistance with plans of attack exchanged through cautious coded messages those tedious series of long and short taps everyone else thought was just a clicking air duct then relinquishing their deluded workplace respect like gust-borne leaves before an autumn storm finally liberated from their cult of decorum for this one desperate guerilla morning battle when like Birnam Wood they bravely advance upon the arriving executives swashbuckling their branches like Errol Flynn’s sword heaving incendiary clumps of potting soil like Marine grenades on Iwo Jima with each ambushed Senior Vice President succumbing to this sudden insurrection of nature falling right there on the mud-splattered hallway floor under the plaque of lies an earthy unromantic end like that of a citified profiteer in a Jack London story but without all the pages of endurance

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Tipton Poetry Journal No. I sit here pigeon-toed in this Cycle of Misemployment pretending to listen to his windy bluster about how I ought to be instead of how I really am nodding thoughtlessly in varying rhythms to placate his biggity torment and I begin to wonder about our brief mortal freedom beyond that leafy window about a life outside about a life in which the clack and whispery metal roar of the file drawer gives way to the sudden flutter of a startled grouse and the scolding chirp of a tail-flicking squirrel.

Sunday Morning on Huron, 1984 Daniel Holland A woman in church clothes jumped off a silent building as I was walking to Walgreen’s for breakfast Passing a helpless man pointing towards the Chicago sky I followed his finger to see her windy plummet There are aspects of the scene that need not be recounted since it was apocalyptic despair that threw her off and we are all familiar But I found myself asking from time to time since if her final moments with gravity were filled with relief or dread The pointing man moved his hand to his head in that salute of despair then jumped into his executive’s car and raced back to his own quiet desperation I looked across the street at the patient clump of yellow floral cotton and noticed how we all hold onto our purses until the very end The Sirens began calling from far away in a tardy warning for this lonely Black body’s final storm As they grew louder with their see-saw roll that parishioner ‘s faith crept onto the sidewalk searching for her promised land

Daniel Holland grew up in Detroit. He is a clinical psychologist in Minneapolis.

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Grounding Jennifer Jussel Response to Dhaka Aubade by Tarfia Faizullah “How can people hurt each other, go on living? Today, I don’t want anything to touch me.”

Today, I don’t want anything to touch me.

I could swear the trees are inching closer, trying to absorb me into the numb-tongued creep.

Breathe, breathe I say.

Count ten things, ten real things.

They call it “grounding,” this technique.

But I don’t want any closer to the ground.

The ground pushes back.

The ground threatens to throw me down.

The ground is where he held me the ground is what holds me.

How can people hurt each other, go on living?

What do I have to count, how slowly do I have to breathe to lift off from this ground, to unravel from my skin to step into a world where my feet are light, where the trees don’t beckon but swish air in their fingers, where nothing will touch me unless I say so?

I’ll say it so!

I want to be a flying tiger, free and poised always to kill whatever might reach for me in this dark.

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Tipton Poetry Journal I want a ground like no ground a ground that is my friend a ground that will crack and lift from the Earth with a giggle and a moaning sigh because you have no idea how painful it is to stand in one place for so long.

I want soft pockets of air to walk before me always ready to catch me and fold me out of sight in a dark billow that always smells like mom’s perfume and the burn of cold enveloping my frosty nose.

I want a quiet world where the sound of two car hoods scraping together is a chorus of friends shouting “I love you we love you we all love you I love you and yes you deserve it!” and people cry when they hear music.

I want rain that is the orange soap from preschool and snow that’s only shaving cream so occasionally I’ll slip and slide right into that stranger I feel like I’ve held close before.

I want a deadly, omniscient love a ground that springs me into flight trees that offer their hands as homes— I want to be hurt, go on living.

I want the ground to unfurl from inside my bones to show me a new and better world to be more than a technique and a place to be to apologize to me and everyone and to respire shyly beneath my prowling feet and until then I want nothing to do with it.

Jennifer Jussel, is a sophomore studying English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is currently an associate editor for the literary nonfiction magazine The 1966, and was also a freelancer and assistant editor for both The Odyssey Online and Unigo.com. Her poetry has been featured in various literary anthologies including Trinity Review, Frontage Roads Magazine and Priory Publication's 2011 literary anthology. This summer, she will be interning for Foundry Literary Agency in New York City.

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Felling H. W. Day I chopped and hacked at that damn mimosa until my hands bled; the fell swoop hardly brought closure: Because that’s exactly what you wanted wasn’t it?

After a magnificent crack I watched as a million of the most fertile seeds on planet Earth joined forces with the wind and littered the yard, planting me in need of a drink of the same name.

H.W. Day is a native of Alabama and received his Doctor of Pharmacy from Auburn University. When he is not sticking folks with needles or dispensing medications, he writes. He resides in Birmingham, Alabama.

The Crayon Not Taken Michael Meyerhofer I am the child in third grade who, right before Thanksgiving, accidentally colored his drawing of a pumpkin green, and I’ve come back to tell you that, too, can make all the difference.

You are the girl who snickered, safe behind what you dutifully made orange with just some green fringe on top, who teased me before you grabbed your coat and rushed off to your waiting parents.

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Tipton Poetry Journal On the way to your grandmother’s, you told them about the stupid boy in class who forgot what color pumpkins were, and because you always played by the rules, now you are wealthy and married.

I, on the other hand, have lived in the backseat of a ‘99 Cavalier in late July, when heat melts the life from seeds and, because it has no place else to go, it wrestles through the soil for air.

True, we both went to college, suffered loves and crises like fevers; the difference being that only one of us knows how awful it is in third grade to botch up the color of pumpkins.

Who sees them when he closes his eyes —green, always green. In patches grown as large as your head, but back then, in the columns of third grade art class, no bigger than the size of your heart.

[This poem was first published in Margie]

Michael Meyerhofer’s fourth book, What To Do If You're Buried Alive, was published

by Split Lip Press. He is also the author of a fantasy series and the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. His work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry, Rattle, Brevity, Tupelo Quarterly, Ploughshares, and many other journals Michael lives in Fresno, California. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

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Mill Scholarship Joseph S. Pete Growing up we thought snow was pink, Pixie-dusted as it was with iron oxide From the open hearth hellfire That blazed day and night at That rusted behemoth of a steel mill.

That’s why every family Had a mill car.

A rust-kissed junker they could drive to work Without having to squander half their life Parked in line at the car wash.

Those were the fairy dust days A college student Could get hired on at the mill In the summer And haul in enough to pay for tuition.

A mill scholarship, they called it.

Steelworkers still made more than most College graduates.

But kids still decamped for university campuses Every fall Like geese migrating south.

Instinctually, they knew the fire In those blast furnaces, Which seemed as steady As as eternal flame at a soldiers’ memorial, Would someday die down.

On some level, We all knew It wasn’t sustainable.

We all knew Snow wasn’t supposed to be pink.

Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, Indiana University graduate, Iraq War veteran and regular guest on his local NPR affiliate. Joseph lives in Griffith, Indiana. His literary work has appeared in Punchnel's, Flying island, Indiana Voice Journal, Dogzplot, shufPoetry, Pulp Modern, Line of Advance, The Five-Two, and elsewhere. He was named Baconfest Chicago 2016 poet laureate, a feat that Milton chump never accomplished.

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We never close Dan Baker The cashier always seemed sad maybe because there’s no closure just an unbroken timeline from 1975 to today of donuts and bad coffee and the lights always on.

Why not get rid of the light switches and hardwire the power to the ballasts?

Put the whole thing on a timer so the lights only come on at night.

Better yet a light sensor so they’re only on when the sky goes dark (like during a storm).

Why have locks on the doors?

I guess in case the Russians or the Muslims or the Fascists attack? You can keep them out for a little while.

Why even have an “OPEN” sign?

If there’s no “CLOSED” to contrast it with, “OPEN” has no meaning.

I tried working 3rd shift, but I only lasted a few days.

I couldn’t fall asleep when the sun was out, besides, the work was not rewarding.

On that fifth day instead of unloading UPS trucks I called you and we got donuts at that 24 hour place and wondered what people do at 3 am when they’re not sleeping or working or eating donuts.

Dan Baker was born in the 70s in rural Wisconsin but now he writes, builds websites and lives with his family in Milwaukee.

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Field Study: Hand Gloria Heffernan Subject studied in natural habitat: It chops the onions for tonight’s chili.

Observe the way the fingers curl around the knife handle making smooth vertical cuts that release the gases that burn the eyes and summon the tears.

Watch it clip the leash to the dog’s collar, and coil the long strap twice around the wrist to keep a firm hold in case he decides to chase the neighbor’s cat.

Study the way it handles the steering wheel, the subtle movements that keep the car centered in the lane, the easy flick of index finger turning the blinker on, smooth return to wheel.

Observe it like a scientist on a field expedition studying the behavior of a moth-so common a thing until you try to count its wingbeats or describe its flight pattern.

And then a meat cleaver falls from the sky.

Don’t ask me how or where it came from.

Shit happens.

Just keep taking notes.

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Tipton Poetry Journal It drops with a thud striking the subject at a 90 degree angle severing the hand at the wrist.

No explanation.

No one to blame.

Just a variable to be observed.

The subject will learn to adjust.

She will find other ways to chop an onion, walk the dog, drive from point A to point B. She will learn to endure the phantom pains in nerve endings that remember what used to be there.

In time they will be a welcome reminder of how far she has progressed.

But that’s a hypothesis for another study.

For now, I must type up these field notes.

It takes twice as long with just one hand.

Gloria Heffernan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in over forty publications including: Chautauqua Journal, Columbia Review, Louisville Review, Stone Canoe, The New York Times Metropolitan Diary, and Talking Writing. She received the 2016 Best Prose Award from Blood and Thunder, the literary journal of the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. Gloria teaches part-time at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and holds a Master’s Degree in English from New York University.

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89 Michael Estabrook How did my mother get to be 89? Seriously. How? One minute we’re stopping off at the Penny Candy Store because we’ve been good in church the next minute she’s shuffling along like a wounded bird holding onto me.

One minute we’re passing around turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy at her sister’s on Thanksgiving the next minute she’s crying because my brother is no longer with us he’s in heaven certainly with Alice and John, Jeannie and Bobby, Grace and Fred, and Daddy.

One minute we’re all huddled around the TV together marveling at the moon landing the next minute she’s telling me for the hundredth time that if she wins the lottery she’s moving back to the Cape. Of course she doesn’t play the lottery but that only matters in the real world.

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Tides Michael Estabrook So Dad didn’t die when he was only 36 Dr. Zullo gave him an experimental drug that rolled the stomach cancer back out to sea And Mom didn’t marry that jackass pencil salesman with his shotguns and beehives and his big stupid Lincoln Town Car She and Dad came around a lot and spoiled the grandchildren taking them to the movies and ball games and out fishing like our grandparents spoiled us And Dad was there when we needed him for advice and to diagnose the problems with our cars simply by cocking his head and listening

Michael Estabrook is retired and living in Massachusetts. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms, able instead to focus on making better poems when he’s not, of course, endeavoring to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List. His latest collection of poems is Bouncy House, edited by Larry Fagin (Green Zone Editions, 2016).

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Broken Toys and News Michael H Brownstein the lifters are clicking again my stubbborn headache fractures eggs it rained all day it rained all night in five American hours my son will be landing somewhere in the Middle East it has rained for days it has rained for nights swales fill with water, creeks overcome their restraints shadows, promises, rivers, passions water is everywhere Poppie our rat terrier sits in my lap or hers sleeping every now and then we walk out into the rain there are times we sleep for an hour other times we sleep for a half dozen or more we cross the flat plains of Missouri, Kansas puddles and patience. somewhere my son has found a place to lay his head a wall perhaps a sea discolored with salt and debris the rain will not stop we travel onwards towards onwardness it rains and rains and rains we are lucky we have the three of us an oil change the lifters quit to a mechanical hum tomorrow we will purchase fresh caught eggs find a dry place within the rain and walk Poppy for a mile or more this is as it should be

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An Asperger Moment Michael H Brownstein She stands motionless in the bright light of darkness counter productive: Time it is to go to bed.

We measure the distance between us in acres; the emotional breadth between us in acres times four.

She has a litany of angers: A band for each insect of intolerance.

I feel the Asperger's child shredding my brain cells, the sociopath, the irritant, the sociologist.

A mountaimtop is a mountaintop as a valley is a hole between landscapes on the rise— So it is with her standing before our bed her F-finger a shotgun, her mouth an F-finger, her stance the F-fingered monster.

Remember, I tell her, I cannot counter punch.

Michael H. Brownstein’s work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others.

In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, MidMissouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He lives in Missouri and is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

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Setting In Sarah Rehfeldt Winter – it is as if the forest lasts forever – everything that needs to be lifted gradually descends here, through the woods hangs silent – light, the shape of branch it fell from, ground accepting, sifting, keeping soft and green a small resting place beneath so what used to be survives.

Sarah Rehfeldt lives with her family in western Washington where she is a writer, artist, and photographer. Her publication credits include Appalachia, Written River, Weber – The Contemporary West, and Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction.

Sarah is the author of Somewhere South of Pegasus, a collection of image poems. It can be purchased through her photography web pages at www.pbase.com/candanceski

If You Wish to Publish Elizabeth Ehrlich Re-submit soon, again and again even if you are a woman but only if you sense between the lines an invitation to do so, or some kind of interest or attention, and if they do not wish you luck placing your work elsewhere.

There are different levels of rejection

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Tipton Poetry Journal If three to five poems are specified, send no more than three hard copy in the mail but up to five online.

You must not send the same poem twice, no matter if revised unless it can’t be recognized Your verse has its right journal, matched in content, politics, and style.

Specific guidelines, themes, and contests may as targets prove much easier than open reading times.

For now the best are out of reach, you must start at the bottom and climb Italicize the spoken voice. “Quotation” marks are obsolete, and titles must use ALL CAPS, justified to the left. Never center titles, underline, or print them out in bold or else your poem looks dated the editors will guess that you are old GARAMOND is out. The 12-point Times New Roman is your font of choice Adverbs are the kiss of death (write carefully in order to avoid) Eschew the sentimental phrase though sentiment itself is fine. These days poetry must walk the finest line

Elizabeth Ehrlich is the author of Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir. She lives and writes in Mamaroneck, New York.

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luminescing Elena Botts i severed my spleen between some winter trees, it was something about how they seized the sky between their branches, it broke me. blood drops on this white canvas like a cardinal flying nowhere to nowhere, it is easy, i have no eyes, these too will be gone, my lungs vanquished by the mountains, those dim sentries in their grey chorus up into the sky. slowly we all learn to breathe out again, to take in the whole landscape and then. my veins always knew they were fleeting pathways the in and out. but it was when i came upon the others bodies in the snow unkissed, the useless feeling they are immaculate, it was a beautiful morning, i wish i could convince you of it, i came apart. now that there is no one around i can bury the corpse, we will not need to dress her in warm clothes she will lay silent and unbreathing in the snow. except that organ i have pried from my chest as slowly it begins to snow. you did not understand these burials, and yet you are here as much as any other object, shadows bend in dull proof of radiance i cannot forget, and that is why i fall back into the earth, a heart given to the universe.

Elena Botts is a poet, writer, and artist who grew up in the DC area, lived briefly in Berlin and Johannesburg, and now attends college in upstate New York and NYC. She has been published in over 90 literary magazines and has won four poetry contests, including Word Works Young Poets. Poetry books include we'll beachcomb for their broken bones (Coffeetown Press, 2015), a little luminescence (Allbook-Books, 2011) and the sadness of snow (Transcendent Zero Press, fall 2017). Go to elenabotts.com for more information or o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com to see her artwork.

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Mein Dampf Jack D. Harvey Gehet hin von mir ihr verfleuchten, in das ewige feur: welches beraitet ist dem Deufel und seinen Engeler.

Hitler in hell roasting on the rotisserie remembers Vienna; cool buildings in his bad paintings white as igloos; on the dirty streets hungry workers queued up.

Hitler in hell languishes, calm and devoted in his pain, in his torment, steadfast as that saint whatshisname, having his ass or something like drawn and quartered; the medieval painters they got it right, the sweet peaches of the saintly behind show no blood and the saint’s benevolent gaze is turned elsewhere.

Towards God? Christ only knows.

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Tipton Poetry Journal And in the limitless sky of his crazy vision Hitler fights on.

Across the great Russian plains his regiments, like saint somethingorother, are drawn, alas, and quartered.

Hitler, judged by a Christian god, whirling into hell, bombs downward, no pullout from this fate, no Icarian soft splash in a plush azure sea; Hitler, like a hooligan, crashes into Hades, spreads like a thrown cake; his remains no monument to justice or reason.

Ixions love bloated cloud-Junos Ixion-Adolf summoned to a divine hate rendered twice-divine, made passionate love to the legions, to the masses, to the masters, and none of them monsters; his right hand made its crazy phallic salute and out of the sinister left and right, Rotfront to Rollkommando, formed thundering herds, bizarre beings, hard as the shells of turtles, unique in their hate as unicorns.

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Tipton Poetry Journal So Herr Hitler hangs in hell, his skin and bones ablaze in the eternal fire.

Holbein and Cranach père, the old masters, knew how to show it all, blossom forth the damned, the demons, the tools of torture, and over it all cast the mortal bane, death and dust and decay.

Hitler expiates his presumption six ways to Sunday, in a lake of fire, in a furnace, in feculence, forever perishing and suffering not for love of glory, golden sum of life, but for lack of sense.

Simple as that.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, Slow Dancer, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines. Jack lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle Sweet Adeline, use a knife and fork and killed a postman.

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Natural Selection Anum Kamran Sattar The ducklings shook their feathers as they clambered onto the shore of the lake.

But the youngest of the ducklings did not swim back home with the others.

A graceful heron stood nearby one leg lifted in the air.

It had its own brood to feed, it's own opinions about the survival of the cutest babies.

Anum Kamran Sattar is a sophomore studying English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her poems have been published in the American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Off the Coast and Wilderness House Literary Review. She won the third Vonna Hicks Award at the college. Whenever possible, she reads out her work at Brooklyn Poets in New York City.

An Apology to His Mother Jennifer Jussel I can see you teaching him to walk.

How his little feet stuttered How his fingers—unbelievably tiny— reached eagerly for yours, with your nails that shined like Christmas.

Maybe it is Christmas.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Maybe you’re taking pictures and laughing and beaming at him as he tears at the paper around the scooter he always wanted.

I can see you loving him holding him through the first broken heart lifting him up when he was rubbing at his eyes I can see you cheering him on or telling him he needs to cut that damn hair or yelling at him about cleaning his room and then feeling a little bad about it, and being thankful that he still loves you.

I can see you loving him, loving him, loving him, crying at his graduation, reminding him to wear his jacket when he goes out trying to keep him safe.

I can see you tying his tie today, wiping the dog’s fur from his black suit jacket, oiling back his hair and then your own from the same jar.

I can see you steadying his hand telling him to be honest, that justice will prevail, and you believe every word of it—yours and his.

I can see why you hate me for hurting him, for even having the audacity to suggest that he would betray you so utterly and completely.

I can see you now, across the room, dressed all in black.

I can see you ignoring me, with the imprints of your sons fingers stamped in black on my skin, and my legs forever shifting to avoid the tear he made between them.

And I don’t blame you.

Because if I were you I would never believe it.

I would never, never believe it.

Jennifer Jussel, is a sophomore studying English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is currently an associate editor for the literary nonfiction magazine The 1966, and was also a freelancer and assistant editor for both The Odyssey Online and Unigo.com. Her poetry has been featured in various literary anthologies including Trinity Review, Frontage Roads Magazine and Priory Publication's 2011 literary anthology. This summer, she will be interning for Foundry Literary Agency in New York City.

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Twilight Again Alan Britt It’s dusk, twilight, silver lining, creeper time, & anyone who knows anything bends an ear to chirrups: kaleidoscope robins, stained-glass goldfinches, white-throated sparrows, doves’ whistling wings, orioles’ magnesium spirals from wild dogwoods beyond split-rail fences, plus cardinals dripping alchemical thoughts like rainwater onto galvanized wash tubs. White heads of clover march in place, albeit disheveled & confused like teenaged North Korean soldiers. Wild rabbit, fawnspeckled, nibbling dandelions or clover, ears cocked like antennae, creased hind leg, vaporizes below purple weeds beside the white-washed shed. Moon’s eyelid cataracts the horizon. In a red collar neighbor’s black Lab kangaroo paws to capture something invisible to the human eye.

Catbird deals blackjack on a split-rail fence behind lusty rose-of-Sharon.

His copper soundwave shakes its shaman rattle eight, ten, twelve times before he snares the twilight, now three cataracts fallen from a redbreast resembling turmeric dust, which is about all that’s left of house finches & cardinals hunkered down for the evening, patio bug light frozen like a grapefruit.

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Miss Quackenbush Alan Britt Miss Quackenbush, 60 something, stringy hair rinsed like sardines in rainwater, braids coiled into a nest, told me something.

Miss Q described an accident involving a '49 Ford bullet grill on Southern Boulevard, if memory serves, & man bleeding her couch, the very same couch my 5-year-old bones relaxed upon that day. The last thing this man, according to Miss Q, his final act upon this earth was to empty his bowels, releasing penultimate humiliation. Attendants scooped him up & out the door, vacuuming their footsteps along the way.

My mother, disconcerted, suggested I spend less time at Miss Q's.

I found reasons to return.

In August 2015 Alan Britt was invited by the Ecuadorian House of Culture BenjamĂ­n CarriĂłn in Quito, Ecuador as part of the first cultural exchange of poets between Ecuador and the United States. In 2013 he served as judge for the The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. He has published 15 books of poetry, his latest being Violin Smoke (Translated into Hungarian by Paul Sohar and published in Romania: 2015). He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University in Maryland.

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Dangerous Women Sewing Doris Lynch (inspired by poet Irina Ratushinskaya’s Russian prison stay in the 1980s)

They took away our pens and notebooks, our woolen tights and the cocoons of our mouton coats, leaving us to shiver in damp prison cells at the end of a Russian winter.

Oddly, they allowed us to keep our darning needles and spools of somber thread: taupe, Baltic grey, ebon, midnight blue.

The warden did not understand what value those tools of haberdashery had, what currency these shards of silver provided— each with its own see-through eye.

Forbidden to compose poems, those incendiary scaffoldings of words, I stripped my cot bare, along with several of the unoccupied ones, and from those worn sheets, those quilted counterpanes, I constructed a paneled suit.

When I entered the commissary, the other women ogled my clothes. They offered me precious cigarette butts, sugar cubes, dried nubs of chocolate in exchange for a stylish outfit of their own. Each night

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Tipton Poetry Journal I threaded my precious needle, taming each unruly thread, refusing to waste even the scraggliest end. Enticed by my lassoing of air, phrases began to flow.

All night I conjured words through the smallest of apertures as I stitched and restitched my world.

Doris Lynch has published work recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, Sow’s Ear, Frogpond, and Haibun Today, and in the anthology Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood. The Indiana Arts Commission has awarded her three individual artist’s grants in poetry and one in fiction.

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The Dandelion May Have Lost My Smile Tina Trutanich The dandelion may have lost my smile.

It currently surfs the Arctic to Mediterranean shores, and barrels from North/West to the Southern Ocean.

It scoffs from Mt. Rainer, as a mauve leather jacket, hides in Hanging Rock, in a cave unknown.

It climbs McKinley, as a corporate psychopath, then dives to prep death for long, last drop at Angel Falls.

It lives in Mariana Trench, in a dark, quiet deepness, eats the wood of old ships, in cold only some gigas know.

It floats as a cirrus cloud, 20,000 feet from Earth, and flies to bubble universes of eternal inflation.

It rots around my toilet ring, as red rod serratia, and grows (x)fold inside, only to die at the hand of bleach.

It returns?

Tina Trutanich is a California native who’s lived in all corners of this country currently lives in a basement in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She started writing poetry at age 10, to construct a plan of escape from an authoritarian, heteronormative Catholic upbringing; creating poems of confessional angst and political manifestos.

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Intellectual Property Rosemary Freedman If I had a map I would circle all the places where we have intellectual property The street is narrow No water for miles The lakes have been converted to Coke or Pepsi Depending on which side of town you live in.

My sister lives under a cloud of suspicion In a city called Paranoia She is constantly ill, because of thirty percent chance of rain And complains of lack of wall space.

I lost all my money Investing in Intellectual Property.

It has no resale value and zero appreciation.

It’s nice to have, but doesn’t pay the bills.

Still I am lured to keep searching Up and down those narrow streets I wonder in search of a bigger piece Of intellectual property.

I scoop up the pieces left behind by all those Who have truly lost their minds.

If things do not begin to look up I will be forced to move in with my sister.

Rosemary Freedman was born the youngest of 7 children on the West side of Indianapolis and now lives in nearby Carmel. She has 7 children and works as a Nurse Practitioner providing psychotherapy and pain management primarily for cancer patients at a major hospital. She and her husband Jack have been married for 7 years. Rosemary gardens and has a lot of perennials. She collects peonies and feels in about three years many of the new ones she planted will mature.

She also collects iris and allium. When younger, Rosemary studied poetry but stepped away from it for many years. Half-way through a doctoral program she decided she would rather spend her time writing poetry than writing 150 page papers that few if anyone would ever read.

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Review: Inheritor by Jeanine Stevens

Reviewed by Barry Harris Title: Inheritor Author: Jeanine Stevens Year: 2016 Publisher: Futurecycle Press

There are two lines from Jeanine Stevens’ poem “Preference” that still haunt me: I will always prefer the oblong over the square, threshold over the cornice to keep the diphthongs from the door.

No amount of going back to the well, nor consulting the oracle at google, will allow me to be sure exactly what the poet intended. I guess that the cornice just lets those slippery diphthongs wiggle in through the doorway.

But that is the charm of the poems in Inheritor. These are rich poems that reveal the undiscovered nature of places and feelings. Stevens’ words play off each other in clever and delightful ways. There is much to be discovered and admired here.

Many of the poems are reflections of travels, primarily to the Mediterranean and the Middle East but also of locales closer to Stevens’ life in the California Sierras and Lake Tahoe. They are poems that evoke a clear sense of humanity and an invitation to Spirit. The volume itself is divided into four sections: Petition, Invitation, Fragments and Foot Stones.

In the title poem of the first section, “Petition,” we read of several methods of petitioning a spiritual intention.

It took a long time to compose the message I secured in the netting at Mary’s House in Ephesus.

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Tipton Poetry Journal “Peace in the family,” a good place to start.

These were not big wars, just minor skirmishes, but enough disruptions to make you wonder about love and devotion.

What if I hadn’t pressed for these things?

I will never know what works.

There are several ghazals offered up in Inheritor. While the traditional ghazal, built of seemingly stand-alone couplets, originally expressed both the beauty of love and the pain of loss or separation, the modern ghazal can address any theme. My favorite is “Brunch Ghazal”: Naked disciples drag nets on the Sea of Tiberius.

Jesus sets up a BBQ. They all toast fish and bread.

In the southern hemisphere it is always tricky to exchange ivory for diamonds, salt for gold.

I still have my Underwood Portable from high school.

A younger man calls me a seasoned poet. Spicy?

At camp I ate the undesirables, gorged on eggs turned green in tin pans and slimy, fish-eyed tapioca.

At Pacific Bell, my first job, the supervisor, Miss Flowers, had the hots for me. I disconnected Mickey Rooney thrice.

A brief walk at coffee break, we discover a hog wrapped in burlap under the wooden bridge. Don’t mention this.

As you can see, a well-turned ghazal can also be trippy.

Speaking of forms, there is a cento (of sorts) titled “House of Candlelight” in the Fragments Section. I had to look up the definition of cento, since it has been a while since I studied poetic forms, not to mention Virgil or Homer. But I found out that is the idea, to mention Virgil or Homer or these days lines of some other great. Jeanine has constructed her cento entirely of poetic lines from Rumi (as translated by Coleman Barks). You really should read the entire poem, but I will leave you with its final arranged lines: When I stop speaking this poem will close and open its silent wings.

The moth is building a house of candlelight.

The title poem in the “Fragments” Section offers up this epigraph by Heraclitus (500 B.C.): What was scattered gathers What was gathered blows apart

The poem consists of five 5-line stanzas where Stevens writes 4 lines and

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Tipton Poetry Journal then ends with an alternating chorus line from Heraclitus (gathers/blows apart etc.) Here are the final 2 stanzas as an illustration: The channel we thought too deep is now a shallow meander.

The Russian River splits its tongue and enters the Pacific.

What was gathered blows apart.

Cosmos trumps chaos; the preacher tries again on the hillsides of Ephesus.

Attentive pilgrims face east.

What was scattered gathers.

Googling stray facts, when reading and reviewing a poet’s work, can also be hazardous. The poem “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” ostensibly was written after viewing Werner Herzog’s documentary film of the same name about the Chauvet Cave in France, which contains Paleolithic art on the cave walls. Stevens mentions in a stanza that At the nearby nuclear plant on the Rhône River, albino crocodiles blinded by residual chemicals flourish in vast cooling ponds.

I say that it can be hazardous because I was so interested in those mutant albino crocodiles that I did a little research – so as to better understand the poem, of course. I stumbled on a Slate article which maintains that the albino crocodiles at the nuclear plant are really albino alligators which were imported from their natural environment in Louisiana. They were not mutated by radiocative chemicals. I think I preferred the poetic license found in the poem.

A poem with a light touch titled “Angels in Summer” celebrates angels who must exist in hot weather to keep an eye on Queen Anne’s lace and other facets of hot steamy July days. These are … not God’s major angels, who are too busy with myth; these are lesser angels taking temp work: available only in summer.

If I could give a flavor to angels in mid-July, it would be pineapple sherbet.

Finally, I would like to provide a glimpse of “Slow Snapshots from a FastMoving Train.” This is a travelogue for the California Zephyr Train which runs from Chicago to San Francisco through Stevens’ home turf of Lake Tahoe and Sacramento. After losing the sleeper car east of Denver,

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Tipton Poetry Journal The Zephyr heads west, climbs the plateau where the Cheyenne made winter camp . . . Ahead, I imagine German POWs working the ice fields. . .

I pause here to consult the oracle one last time. I had no idea – perhaps you did – that during WW II almost half a million German Prisoners of War were housed at 700 POW camps in 46 states in the U.S. One of them apparently was near the Sierra Nevada icefields.

Then the train ride starts up again for me.

In daylight we travel past a turquoise lake.

The Donner Party still sleeps in deep snow, their wagons lashed for a final trip over the summit.

The poem closes after the train pulls into the Sacramento Depot and Jeanine Stevens is home.

Home, I wake at 3 a.m. to the train’s wail, think of all the lost looking for a place to rest.

I have no knowledge of life without a pillow or weary head on stone.

Yet we must all drift to the same dream: white canyons, amulet guarding an open door, worn threshold, spoon by the plate, the same dream.

Stevens has a remarkable way of finding and presenting the subjects of her poetry that makes plain the rich humanity we share with each other.

If you pick up and read Inheritor, I believe you will find a friend whispering to you about some things perhaps you hadn’t noticed. At the very least, it should keep the diphthongs from the door.

Jeanine Stevens studied poetry at UC Davis and CSU Sacramento and has advanced degrees in Anthropology and Education. She just received her fourth Pushcart Nomination.

Raised in Indiana, she now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Barry Harris is founding editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center. Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

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Things Forgotten Gene Twaronite There’s a store in the mall selling personalized engraved gifts to remember every occasion.

Too bad there’s not a store to help you forget those moments in life engraved on your brain: that time in second grade when the bully won and you ran away, the slap in your daughter’s face and the slam of the door when she left, the thud of his head as it hit the windshield, the look in your wife’s eyes when she caught you in your naked deceit, the words that still echo in your head or the words you should have said, the relentless pain she endured that helped you decide at the end, the hour just before dawn when you relive the horrors again and again.

No need for fancy gifts—sandpaper and a buffing wheel will do, applied judiciously to remove just enough letters to dull the pain without losing their meaning, just enough to let you sleep at night.

Gene Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of six books, including two juvenile fantasy novels. His first book of poetry, Trash Picker on Mars, has recently been published by Aldrich Press. Visit his website at http://www.thetwaronitezone.com.

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Those Who Have No Hope Douglas Macdonald

Douglas Macdonald has work in Imperfect Fiction and a short story in the volume Visions of Life (2015). Douglas lives in Evanston, Illinois and is a member of the Evanston Writers Workshop.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and Brick Street Poetry’s Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center. 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, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness and Writers‘ Bloc.

One of his poems is 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.

Poet Biographies Henry Ahrens is a graduate of St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana. He teaches a variety of high school English classes in Cincinnati, Ohio. His work has appeared in Pudding Magazine and From the Edge of the Prairie, an annual anthology published by the Prairie Writers’ Guild based in Rensselaer.

Dan Baker was born in the 70s in rural Wisconsin but now he writes, builds websites and lives with his family in Milwaukee.

CL Bledsoe is an assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of fourteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray's Sea World. Originally from rural Arkansas, he lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Elena Botts is a poet, writer, and artist who grew up in the DC area, lived briefly in Berlin and Johannesburg, and now attends college in upstate New York and NYC. She has been published in over 90 literary magazines and has won four poetry contests, including Word Works Young Poets. Poetry books include we'll beachcomb for their broken bones (Coffeetown Press, 2015), a little luminescence (Allbook-Books, 2011) and the sadness of snow (Transcendent Zero Press, fall 2017). Go to elenabotts.com for more information or o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com to see her artwork.

In August 2015 Alan Britt was invited by the Ecuadorian House of Culture Benjamín Carrión in Quito, Ecuador as part of the first cultural exchange of poets between Ecuador and the United States. In 2013 he served as judge for the The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. He has published 15 books of poetry, his latest being Violin Smoke (Translated into Hungarian by Paul Sohar and published in Romania: 2015). He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University in Maryland.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Michael H. Brownstein’s work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He lives in Missouri and is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

Richard Alan Bunch is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of several collections of poetry, including Concert by Blue Moonlight, A Sausalito Moon, Santa Rosa Plums, and Dancing in the Cool Morning Light. His poetry has appeared in Windsor Review, Poetry New Zealand, Hurricane Review, Poem, Hawai’i Review, Many Mountains Moving, Red River Review, Slant, Homestead Review, Dirigible, Tipton Poetry Journal, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, West Wind Review, Comstock Review, and the Oregon Review. His latest work is titled Kottenmouth and Other Poems of Love.

He resides with his family in Davis, California.

H.W. Day is a native of Alabama and received his Doctor of Pharmacy from Auburn University. When he is not sticking folks with needles or dispensing medications, he writes. He resides in Birmingham, Alabama.

Elizabeth Ehrlich is the author of Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir. She lives and writes in Mamaroneck, New York.

Kristina England is a writer and photographer residing in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in several magazines, including Apeiron Review, Five 2 One Magazine, Gargoyle, Silver Birch Press, and Zoomoozophone Review. She can be followed on facebook at http://facebook.com/kristinaengland .

Michael Estabrook is retired and living in Massachusetts. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms, able instead to focus on making better poems when he’s not, of course, endeavoring to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.

His latest collection of poems is Bouncy House, edited by Larry Fagin (Green Zone Editions, 2016).

Maureen Tolman Flannery grew up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Wyoming and lives in Chicago where she is an English teacher, wood-carver and Home Funeral Guide. Among her eight books are Tunnel into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Ancestors in the Landscape. Her poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, North American Review, Xavier Review, BorderSenses, Birmingham Poetry Review, Calyx, Pedestal, Poetry East, Atlanta Review. Arroyo, Comstock Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Rosemary Freedman was born the youngest of 7 children on the West side of Indianapolis and now lives in nearby Carmel. She has 7 children and works as a Nurse Practitioner providing psychotherapy and pain management primarily for cancer patients at a major hospital. She and her husband Jack have been married for 7 years. Rosemary gardens and has a lot of perennials. She collects peonies and feels in about three years many of the new ones she planted will mature. She also collects iris and allium. When younger, Rosemary studied poetry but stepped away from it for many years. Half-way through a doctoral program she decided she would rather spend her time writing poetry than writing 150 page papers that few if anyone would ever read.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, Slow Dancer, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines. Jack lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle Sweet Adeline, use a knife and fork and killed a postman.

Gloria Heffernan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in over forty publications including: Chautauqua Journal, Columbia Review, Louisville Review, Stone Canoe, The New York Times Metropolitan Diary, and Talking Writing. She received the 2016 Best Prose Award from Blood and Thunder, the literary journal of the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. Gloria teaches part-time at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and holds a Master’s Degree in English from New York University.

Rich Ives is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His books include Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a prose work for each day of the year (Silenced Press), Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, (Newer York Press), Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, (Bitter Oleander Press), and a story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books). Rich lives in Washington State.

Daniel Holland grew up in Detroit. He is a clinical psychologist in Minneapolis.

Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, Chicago State University, and Governors State University. He has published poetry in Anchor and Plume Press/Kindred Magazine, Arkansas Review, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Bombay Gin, Burningword Literary Review, Canary, Indiana Voice Journal, Common Ground Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, The Opiate, and Red Fez to name a few. He is a former educator, steel worker, and army spook. He lives in Illinois and is a member of the Carlinville Writers Guild. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015. He is currently looking for a publisher for a collection of poetry.

Jennifer Jussel, is a sophomore studying English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is currently an associate editor for the literary nonfiction magazine The 1966, and was also a freelancer and assistant editor for both The Odyssey Online and Unigo.com. Her poetry has been featured in various literary anthologies including Trinity Review, Frontage Roads Magazine and Priory Publication's 2011 literary anthology. This summer, she will be interning for Foundry Literary Agency in New York City.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Michael Keshigian’s twelfth poetry collection, Into The Light, will be released this Spring by Flutter Press. His other published books and chapbooks include: Inexplicable, Beyond, Dark Edges, Eagle’s Perch, Wildflowers, Jazz Face, Warm Summer Memories, Silent Poems, Seeking Solace, Dwindling Knight, Translucent View. Published in numerous national and international journals, he is a 6- time Pushcart Prize and 2-time Best Of The Net nominee. His poetry cycle, Lunar Images, set for Clarinet, Piano, Narrator, was premiered at Del Mar College in Texas. Subsequent performances occurred in Boston (Berklee College) and Moleto, Italy. Winter Moon, a poem set for Soprano and Piano, premiered in Boston. Michael lives in New Hampshire. http://michaelkeshigian.com.

Thomas Locicero is an award-winning poet, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a playwright and monologist. His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Boston Literary Magazine, The Long Island Quarterly, Riverrun, Omnibus Arts & Literature Anthology, The Good Men Project, A&U: America's AIDS Magazine, and Beginnings. Originally from East Islip, Long Island, Thomas resides with his wife, Lil, and their sons, Sam and Ben, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Doris Lynch has published work recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, Sow’s Ear, Frogpond, and Haibun Today, and in the anthology Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood. The Indiana Arts Commission has awarded her three individual artist’s grants in poetry and one in fiction.

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 39 years. After teaching in Hong Kong she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews such as Colere, Crone, Trajectory, Earth Daughters, Feile-Festa and Whirlwind.

She spends time each year teaching in Nicaragua. She is a member of the California Writers Club and Healdsburg Literary Guild. She is an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in Vallejo, California.

Douglas Macdonald has work in Imperfect Fiction and a short story in the volume Visions of Life (2015). Douglas lives in Evanston, Illinois and is a member of the Evanston Writers Workshop.

Michael Meyerhofer’s fourth book, What To Do If You're Buried Alive, was published

by Split Lip Press. He is also the author of a fantasy series and the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. His work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry, Rattle, Brevity, Tupelo Quarterly, Ploughshares, and many other journals Michael lives in Fresno, California. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.

Milt Montague was born and raised and lives now in New York City. He survived The Great Depression, the school system, and World War ll. Back to finish college, marry and help raise 3 lovely daughters. After many years as an independent business person, retirement and back to college, spent 20 years of reveling in knowledge, then discovered writing at 85. Now at 90 plus he has 98 poems and 15 brief memoirs published in 35 different magazines, so far…..

Jack Moody is a short story writer, poet and freelance journalist from wherever he happens to be at the time. He has had work published in Down in the Dirt Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Round Up, CC&D Magazine and Southern Pacific Review, with work forthcoming in Brick Moon Fiction. He didn't go to college. He likes his privacy

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Tipton Poetry Journal Lorne Mook teaches at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Some of his poems are gathered in his book Travelers without Maps. His translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems have appeared in journals and in his book Dream-Crowned, the first English translation of a collection that Rilke published in 1897 when he was 21.

Yvonne Morris works as a writing instructional specialist and adjunct instructor in communications at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Her first chapbook, Mother was a Sweater Girl, was published in 2016 by The Heartland Review Press.

Keith Moul’s poems and photos appear widely. He received his MA from Western Washington and his PhD from the University of South Carolina. He now lives in Port Angeles, Washington. Finishing Line released his chapbook, The Future as a Picnic Lunch in 2015. Aldrich Press published Naked Among Possibilites in 2016 and accepted No Map at Hand for 2017. Finishing Line will publish Investment in Idolatry early in 2017 Amanda Negron was the victim of severe child abuse at the hands of her mother and was removed by social services as a teenager. She writes poetry about her experiences with abuse to share with others. Now 23 years old and living in Maryland, Amanda has a BA in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is working on her first novel about abuse.

Karen June Olson lived the first half of her life in Michigan and currently resides in Missouri. Her poems have appeared in 2River, The Mas Tequila Review, UCity Review, and Third Wednesday. She is professor emerita in early childhood education and is writing her first collection of poetry.

Sergio A. Ortiz is the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. 2nd place in the 2016 Ramón Ataz Annual Poetry Competition sponsored by Alaire publishing house. He lives in Puerto Rico and is currently working on his first fulllength collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

James Owens' most recent collection of poems is Mortalia from FutureCycle Press.. His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connecticut River Review, Lime Hawk, and The Stinging Fly. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in central Indiana and northern Ontario.

Elaine Fowler Palencia is the book review editor of Pegasus, the journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a member of the Quintessential Poets of ChampaignUrbana, Illinois. Her work has received six Pushcart Prize Nominations. She has fiction forthcoming in the Pikeville Review.

Akshaya Pawaskar is an Indian and doctor by profession and dabbles in poetry. Her poems are published in EFiction India, Writer’s Ezine, Ink drift, Poetry superhighway, Indian ruminations and anthologies by Lost Tower Publications. Akshaya lives in western India.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, Indiana University graduate, Iraq War veteran and regular guest on his local NPR affiliate. Joseph lives in Griffith, Indiana. His literary work has appeared in Punchnel's, Flying island, Indiana Voice Journal, Dogzplot, shufPoetry, Pulp Modern, Line of Advance, The Five-Two, and elsewhere. He was named Baconfest Chicago 2016 poet laureate, a feat that Milton chump never accomplished.

Stacy Post is a Midwestern writer in multiple forms. Her poetry chapbook, Sudden Departures, debuted with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Quail Bell Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Flying Island, Midwestern Gothic, Pearl, Iodine Poetry Journal and others. A Pushcart Prize nominee for short fiction, her stories have appeared in CHEAP POP, Boston Literary Magazine, moonShine review, Fiction365, Referential Magazine and others. Her short plays have been produced in festivals around the U.S. She works as a librarian by day and resides in the Indiana heartland. www.stacypost.com Donna Pucciani, Chicago-based writer, has published poetry on four continents in such diverse journals as Poetry Salzburg, Istanbul Literary Review, Shi Chao Poetry, Journal of Italian Translation, Acumen and Feile-Festa. Her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Japanese and German. In addition to five Pushcart nominations, she has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council and The National Federation of State Poetry Societies, among others. Her seventh and most recent collection of poems is Edges (Purple Flag Press, Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2016).

Sarah Rehfeldt lives with her family in western Washington where she is a writer, artist, and photographer. Her publication credits include Appalachia, Written River, Weber – The Contemporary West, and Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction.

Sarah is the author of Somewhere South of Pegasus, a collection of image poems. It can be purchased through her photography web pages at www.pbase.com/candanceski Steven Riel is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House Press, 2014), as well as three chapbooks, the most recent of which, Postcard from P-town, was selected as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize and published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and several periodicals, including International Poetry Review and The Minnesota Review. Steven lives in Massachusetts.

Timothy Robbins teaches ESL and does freelance translation in Wisconsin. He has a BA in French and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Indiana University. He has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His poems have also appeared appeared in Three New Poets, Long Shot, The James White Review, Evergreen, Off The Coast, Slant, Main Street Rag and various small zines.

Anum Kamran Sattar is a sophomore studying English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her poems have been published in the American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Off the Coast and Wilderness House Literary Review. She won the third Vonna Hicks Award at the college. Whenever possible, she reads out her work at Brooklyn Poets in New York City Gerard Sarnat MD has been nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. He lives in California and has authored Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting the Ice King (2016) which included work published in Gargoyle and Lowestoft. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s Kaddish for the Country for distribution as a pamphlet on Inauguration Day 2017 and as part of the Washington/nationwide Women’s Marches.

Gerry’s built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Med professor. GerardSarnat.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal Tom Speaks is a professional speaker, historical fiction author, and writer of poetry, history and philosophy. He is the co-founder and co-owner of The Impact Group (www.IGPR.com). a public relations and marketing firm. He lives in Hudson, Ohio with his wife and two children.

Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring from Ravenna Press, plus three chapbooks. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, and other journals.

Joannie lives in Seattle.

Jeanine Stevens Jeanine Stevens studied poetry at UC Davis and CSU Sacramento. She has advanced degrees in Anthropology and Education. Her second poetry collection, Inheritor, was published by Future Cycle Press, 2016. Recent winner of the WOMR Cape Cod National Poetry Competition and the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award.

She just received her fourth Pushcart Nomination. Poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evansville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Journal, Verse Wisconsin, Stoneboat and others. Raised in Indiana, she now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Allison Thorpe is a writer from Lexington, Kentucky. The author of several collections of poetry, she has recent work appearing or forthcoming in So To Speak, Pembroke Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Grasslimb Journal, Dying Dahlia, The Corvus Review, Bop Dead City, Crab Fat, and Yellow Chair Review.

Mark Trechock is director of a community organizing effort in western North Dakota.

Recently, his poems have appeared in such journals as Red Wheelbarrow, Radius, Kudzu House, Shark Reef Passager and Triggerfish.

Tina Trutanich is a California native who’s lived in all corners of this country currently lives in a basement in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She started writing poetry at age 10, to construct a plan of escape from an authoritarian, heteronormative Catholic upbringing; creating poems of confessional angst and political manifestos.

Gene Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of six books, including two juvenile fantasy novels. His first book of poetry, Trash Picker on Mars, has recently been published by Aldrich Press. Visit his website at http://www.thetwaronitezone.com.

Rebecca Weigold's poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tishman Review, The Ekphrastic Review, BlazeVox, Winamop!, and The Skinny Poetry Journal. In 1987, she founded/published The Cincinnati Poets' Collective poetry journal which featured the work of national and international poets for nearly a decade. Rebecca lives in Kentucky.

Dominique Wilson is a college student from New York at Coppin State University in Maryland. Her poem, How to Survive a Witch (published in TPJ Summer 2016), was one of our nominees for the 2016 Pushcart Prize.

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