OUT OF SERVICE

by Jan Steckel

Ghost cars with their lights still on, 
radios blaring, windows shattered,
litter the streets. It's like the rapture, 
drivers disappeared. Alex Pretti's
beautiful baritone talks about service,
sacrifice, freedom that isn't free.
He's reciting his own epitaph,
just doesn't know it yet.
Boy Scout, choir boy, runner, biker, 
named his dog Joule after a unit of energy.
Someone needs to immortalize him
in a song, like Joe Hill. I'm tired
of snuff videos featuring our best
and brightest. Bone-weary
of tinpot dictators, bantam Nazis 
in custom greatcoats. Alex was a lover
who was loved, cared for people,
made them laugh. Now he's meat.
The pathologist will crack his chest,
weigh his heart, find it lighter 
than a feather. Joe Hill tells Joule,
"Hear that? He's coming."
All the ghost cars flash their lights
in time to the whistles and shots.

Ghosts and Oceans, Jan Steckel's latest book, is a collection of short fiction. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet won a Lambda Literary Award. Her books Like Flesh Covers Bone, Mixing Tracks, and The Underwater Hospital also won awards.

EPITAPH FOR AN ELOQUENT: REMEMBERING KRIS KRISTOFFERSON

by W. Barrett Munn

Above are marble figures,
unmoving angels' wings,
with pale and polished faces
that will fade and flatten over ages
like forgotten wax on summer shelves,
and there, below those two
future faded vestiges,
lies a troubadour,
with nothing more to sing
and an epitaph hard to accept—
Here Lies Me and Bobby McGee.

W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature where he studied writing under Larry Callen. His adult poetry has appeared in Awakenings Review, San Antonio Review, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Volney Road Review, Speckled Trout Review, Book of Matches, and many others. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

EPITAPH FOR MARGARET THATCHER

by J.R. Solonche



The Iron Lady is deceas'd.
So may her soul now rust in peace.


J.R. Solonche is co-author (with wife Joan Siegel) of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines, journals, and anthologies since the 1970s. He teaches at SUNY Orange in Middletown, New York.