FIFTY YEARS ACROSS

by Robert E. Petras




A shooting star sparks gold
Across the Ohio.
This night vein dissolves
Fireflies spark.
In the northwest clouds dry-hump heat lightning.
A storm may or may not come.
I palm a firefly and its pumping light.

The first cricket of summer chirps.

For every six bottle rockets
One is a dud,
Our seventh-grade gym teacher
Told us boys, lined up,
As he checked us,
Tight-lipped,
For groin pulls,
His hands in a V.
His eyes smiling

“Dud” I can still hear his grotto voice.

That’s the night Joey Geiger drowned.
That’s the first time I saw a shooting star
Shoot dry.

I open my palm
The firefly flits into the sequined night.
A second cricket chirps.

“Dud.”

Robert E. Petras is a resident of Toronto, Ohio and a graduate of WestLiberty University.  His poems and fiction have appeared in more than 250 publications across the globe.

FOR PAT SUMMITT: NEVER FORGOTTEN

by Jill Crainshaw

Pat Summitt, who was at the forefront of a broad ascendance of women’s sports, winning eight national basketball championships at the University of Tennessee and more games than any other Division I college coach, male or female, died on Tuesday. She was 64. Her death was confirmed on the website of the Pat Summitt Foundation. Summitt stepped down after 38 seasons and 1,098 victories at Tennessee in April 2012, at 59, less than a year after she learned she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. —The New York Times, June 28, 2016

she sits on the edge of her bed
and laces a pair of red converse
hi-tops the toe edge on the left one
scuffed for greatness she is certain of it
and proud of that work-worn abrasion
but no one else knows or even cares
about her dream or that she spends
two hours after sixth grade math class
every day in the backyard where her
springboard to stardom has been
hanging for the last year since she begged
and begged and her daddy gave in and
nailed it to an aging pine tree
not quite regulation height
above ground now made bald from
thousands of toe dancing dribbles
behind her back between her legs
ball leaping up from red southern clay
to stain her hands forever with a passion
no one else gave a second thought to
for a too-tall scrawny girl with a ponytail
who always sat alone at the very back
of bus 81 she tugs the laces tight
the way she likes them then grabs
her rawlings from the closet and heads
out the door for the old pine stopping
as she does every time she leaves her room
to rub her shooting hand over the lady vols
program she got that one time
her cousin took her to a game and
the coach even signed it for her

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her poems have appeared in *82 Review and Five Magazine and in an anthology by Wicwas Press. She is also the author of a number of books on worship and theology.

THE COACH

by Howard Winn

Dennis Hastert. AP photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais via ThinkProgress.

A hero in his small town
as is often the case where
there is a wish for local heroes
and some must be found
to satisfy the need to brag
therefore he and his students
fulfilled the boosters need
for his young disciples won
their matches in the
wresting ring to the glory
of the school and these
adolescent athletes who
spread the fame of their
coach who seemed to love
his young charges learning
the holds and the tricks
of the wresting trade
and much more hidden
from public and pubic
view concealed outside
the showers or the gym.
Taking his deceitfulness
to the shadiness of politics
he smiled as he corrupted
the democratic process
of government while reaping
the financial benefits of that guile
to fatten banks accounts
 both his own and that of
certain colleagues who
shared his lack of ethics
until caught manipulating
bank accounts with an
illegal wrestling of his
fortune to silence a now
grown lover boy who
demanded hulking payment
for his silence so caught
and sentenced as ironic
reward to the prison he
bought with his conduct.


Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Descant.  Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Main Street Rag, Evansville Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, 3288 Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Blueline. He has a novel coming out soon from Propertius Press. His B.A. is from Vassar College. his M.A. from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. His doctoral work was done at NYU. He is Professor of English at SUNY-Duchess.

BALLS

by Douglas G. Brown

In the home of the bean and the cod,

The footballs were some deflated;

Coach Belichick sits at the right hand of God,

And the Patriots fans are elated.

Douglas G. Brown is a former geologist and chemical worker. His light verse has been published in Light, Lightenup Online, The Spectator, and Trinacria. Brown is a lukewarm Red Sox and Bruins fan, but only has an interest in football whan a scandal erupts (or, deflates).