NO SEATS AND ONE TOILET

by Susan Cossette

Challenger Deep, Hades Zone—

There are better maps of the moon and Mars.

 

Humans like superlatives—

Highest, lowest, longest.

Hubris.

 

We sit cross legged, barefoot—

watching for golden pocketwatches,

chipped china and worn shoes, 

footprints sunk in silent ocean sand.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

THE COST OF MAGIC

by Brian O'Sullivan

Union leaders say the traditionally high status of teachers in Ireland is under threat due to a combination of issues such as pay, workload, limited promotional posts and the growing complexity of the job. So, is teaching still an attractive profession? We asked delegates at teachers’ unions annual gatherings. —“Is Teaching Still an Attractive Profession?” The Irish Times, April 11, 2023

Orla Ryng told The Irish Times that “that magic

of being in the classroom is still there.” That magic

turns a student’s face from the cell phone’s dim light

to the brightness of a peer and an idea. That magic

turns some paper mache into a volcano,  and it

turns jumbled numbers into that kind of magic

spell mathematicians call a formula, and it even turns

the mangled words of social media into that magic

that I—and you, I bet?—value just about the most:

Words that leap and love and shout that magic,

which is to say poetry, will never die. And it’s with words

and letters that teachers are rewarded—like that magic

“N.T.” that got dangled off the ends of National Teachers’ names

in Ireland. My dad, being Irish, seemed to believe in that magic;

he asked, as I trudged through grad school, when I’d

be getting “the letters after [my] name,” that magic

“Ph.D.,” and I thought he was just teasing me, but later

I knew that even he, a practical guy, valued that magic

of letters. But letters don’t pay rent, and so Sean

Maher lives with his parents, still valuing that magic

That devalues him. Economists may

say that if you get good money and you also get that magic,

then you’ve been paid twice. ‘No one goes into teaching

expecting huge wages,” says Eoin Fenton; that magic

serves in place of huge wages, and asking for both money and magic

might be hubris. But would it, in the end, be all that tragic?

Brian O'Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric in southern Maryland. He has had creative writing published in ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, and Every Day Fiction.

SELF-MADE MAN

by Tom Russell

I gave birth to myself.

I discovered fire so that I could eat
whatever I, alone, produced.

I didn’t read your books,
you read mine.

I coined all the phrases.

I invented the wheel
and built all the roads
that wheels carry my money on.

I did all this with no help from anyone.

I created the dial tones and cyberspace
and made all the deals.

I forged all my own tools,
and that includes you.

Now you want to abuse me
with your regulations and taxations.
Blathering about responsibility
and shared sacrifice.

Suck it up, weasels.
Next you’ll be wanting your own bootstraps.

I don’t care who among you
gets sick or dies.
It pleases me
to see the spite you have for each other.

You are blind and weak.
Even if you could see my curtain
you wouldn’t be able to move it
and know that I am there.


Tom Russell works for the Omaha Public Library in Omaha, Nebraska. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Shot Glass Journal, and Crab Fat Literary Magazine.

WAR

by David M. Myles

It      is        

stored in the soul
of a people
and hungers
to be relevant
to more than the
sycophants of
golden calves


there      was

a time when we
thought it good
to strike out
in anger and fear
and the hubris
of the tears
of tragic death

It       has

scarred us as
a nation and the
wound has turned
in on itself on
ourselves and we pick
at the scab of the
the children laying dead

There       will

come a reckoning
our histories scream
our mutual doom
History is not a script
it is a cautionary tale
which doesn't end well
for the protagonists


David M. Myles is a Freelance Technophile and writer currently living in the Ohio Valley. Originally from New York City, Myles has lived all over the United States and the UK gathering experiences and fixing errant computers and networks His new e-book Folly is available on Kindle or Amazon.com.