Artwork copyright Ryn Holmes 2022

How time flies! Internally, we’re marveling at our milestone of 20 issues. Issue 21 will complete our seventh year, quite a journey that began with outdoor coffee at dusk. Not quite a garage band or a garage business, but you get the idea!

2021 brought a great deal of personal disruption to this Team. (Join the club, right?) We’re fortunate to have each other and to be able to share the wonders laid before us. When physics hurts, go for metaphysics.

Issue 20 ushers in  two poems about grief, two from women named Roberta and two from women named Chris, a Christmas ditty and a New Year’s welcome, high school memories, some very short pieces, some very long ones, artistic allusions galore, and more to delight and inspire.

As always, thank you submitters, contributors, readers, and benefactors. We derive great satisfaction from our little place in this expanding world of the written word and hope you do as well.

Let’s make it a great year!

Love,
Andrea, Jeff, and Ryn, Editors

Contents
#1 Poetoum – Laurie Byro
After Discovering Mother’s Passport – Tina Barry
After “Landscape and Jacaranda,”– Peter Mitchell
All Songs – Barry Peters
All Those Wildflowers – Renee Cronley
At the Back Fence – Karen Loeb
Before This, The Occaneechi – Maura High
Between Being and Not Being – Matthew Friday
Between the Moon and Me – William Reichard
Black Stones – Steve Gerson
Capnomancy – Chris Armstrong
Childhood Never Happens Again – Ryan Quinn Flanagan
Commentary  L. Ward Abel
Diners – Rachel R. Baum
The First Stage of Grief – Jane Snyder
Grief
Gust – JC Niala
Happy New Year, San Miguel de Allende – John Milkereit
Indecent Exposure – Roberta Schultz
Jeanne d’Arc of the Suburbs – Laura Jan Shore
Kayak – Katherine Gotthardt
The Keepsake Diner – Don Pomerantz
Kinship – Chris Wood
La Mer – Roberta Brown
The Leaf Blowers – Judy Bolton-Fasman
The Lure – by Andrew Jeter
Math Game – Don Noel
Maundy Thursday – Emily Rose Proctor
Morningtide – Diana Dinverno
Musing On Auguste and William – Sharon Berg
A Nickel Short of Heaven – Audrey Howitt
Our Dalliance: Elegy – Linda Jackson Collins
Pandemic Barbie – Dustin Brookshire
Rivals – Charles Rammelkamp
Rural Sonnet – Paul Ilechko
Sand – Alicia Viguer-Espert
Sea Chanteys – Ann Howells
Seeing Life for What It Is – Jeannie Roberts
Sergei’s Hands – Jack Ritter
she had wine with gertrude stein’s widow – Connie Carmichael
Sitting in Bathwater at 1 am – John Casquarelli
Sometimes I Wonder – Scott Ferry
Swam with a whale shark again in 2021 – Sha Huang
Tables of Content – Bruce Robinson
Themes Unbecoming – Victor Pambuccian
Those Dead Shrimp Blues – Charlotte Hamrick
To the Boy with the Golden Hair – Ellen Austin-Li
To Our Executor (first draft) – Tom Barlow
Tonight is the Night I Break Jimmy Taylor’s Poor Heart – Francine Witte
Unexpected Epiphany – Marcelo Medone
A Visit from “The Florida Flash” – Karla Linn Merrifield
Was I Born Hollow – Stephen Douglas Wright
Whisky Hourglass – Hugh Anderson