Roberta Gibson

UNPUNISHED

Five retired detectives murmur to each other,
Was one of their own a serial killer?
Investigated by friends.
Questions not asked,
Questions not answered.

Five reasons to wonder
In the 1960s, before no-fault divorce,
Before trained medical examiners,
Before DNA forensics,
Before the term “serial killer” was even coined.

Five victims he knew.
A young neighbor,
His lover’s spouse,
His own spouse -- only four months later,
Two children who knew too much? Or were in the way?

Five times first on the scene.
As if he knew where to go,
Or that he needed to obscure the evidence?
Control the outcome?
Or five coincidences?

Five deaths ruled accidents.
An accidental hanging (rare event),
A heart attack (victim only 35),
Fatal black widow bite (extremely unlikely),
Fire started by a toy.

Five holes left in other people’s lives.
Mothers and fathers,
Sisters and brothers,
Holes in the ground, holes in the community
Who knows what could have been?

Five headstones baking in the sun
Was he a serial killer?
Was he unlucky?
Or was he very lucky?
With the passage of time, no way to tell.


Roberta's YouTube video reading of "Unpunished":



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Roberta confesses: "I’ve hesitated to share this story because it offers more questions than answers. I realized, however, that because the same coroner ruled all the deaths as accidental, it is also about what a difference a well-trained, well-staffed, well-funded medical examiner’s office might have made."


ROBERTA GIBSON came to writing after a career as a scientist. Her most recent publications include the short story "Fine Lines" in the Desert Sleuth's anthology SoWest: Love Kills and “The Journeys in Between” short story published in Clinch: A Literary Martial Arts Magazine. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband and son. She also writes for multiple blogs, which you can find linked at her website https://robertagibsonwrites.com/

Amy Grech

ORANGE JULIUS

Vermilion froth,
tart and sweet.
The perfect treat
when you need a break
from the endless storefronts
in the suburban mecca vying
for your attention and
hard-earned dollars.

Ceaseless foot traffic, a
steady stream. Perfect for
an orange dream. Things aren’t
always what they seem...

Married couples bicker,
cigarette butts flicker,
burning bright
like miniature suns.

Neon lights delight
a mother and her daughter
holding a red balloon.
Childlike whimsy on display
at KB Toys. Something
for all the girls and boys.

Orange dream.
Things aren’t always what
they seem...

Teenagers canoodle.
Kids play with
pool noodles in a ball pit.
Management doesn’t give a shit
as you hit rock bottom.
You’ve got a short fuse
and nothing to lose.

You had a good job
at a store on the second floor.
Waldenbooks. You loved
the work, but your boss,
a real jerk, didn’t care.
He said you stared at customers,
did as you pleased, and
put them ill at ease.
With that, you were fired,
so, you conspired.

You took your father’s gun,
a police-issued .38 snubnose Smith
& Wesson revolver out of
your trench coat,
taking aim at everyone.

Bullets rain down,
a lethal hailstorm, hitting their mark.
The world goes dark as hapless
shoppers fall like dominoes,
riddled with pinpoint precision holes
spouting blood amongst the
incessant shouting as
their shopping bags
crumble and they
wither, like flowers
cut down before full bloom
.
The little girl with the red balloon
along with her mother, promising
lives ended too soon.


Amy's YouTube video reading of "Orange Julius":



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Amy confesses: "'Orange Julius' was inspired by the namesake booth at my local suburban mall on Long Island. Beloved brands, frozen in time, and a disgruntled employee coalesce with dire consequences."

AMY GRECH has sold over 100 stories to various anthologies and magazines including A New York State of Fright, Apex Magazine, Even in the Grave, Gorefest, Hell’s Heart, Hell’s Highway, Hell’s Mall, Microverses, Punk Noir Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, Tales from the Canyons of the Damned, The One That Got Away, Under Her Skin, Yellow Mama, and many others. She is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers who lives in New York. You can connect with her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/amy_grech or visit her website: https://www.crimsonscreams.com.

Stephen D. Rogers

WOMEN, GIRLS, AND SPINSTERS

How many women die each year
Just so an amateur sleuth
Can trip over the body
Just so a detective
Can fight for justice
Can make it personal
Can overcome a tragic past
How many women die each year
Simply to generate clues?


Stephen's YouTube video reading of "Women, Girls, and Spinsters":



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Stephen confesses nothing.

STEPHEN D. ROGERS is the author of SHOT TO DEATH and more than 800 shorter works. His website, www.StephenDRogers.com, includes a list of new and upcoming titles as well as other timely information.

Teel James Glenn

LUCKED OUT

Life is a lottery
Chips to be cashed
Dice to be rolled
Bones to be cast
Probable outcomes
Shuffled and spread
Whatever the top card
You’ll sure end up
Dead!


Teel's YouTube video reading of "Lucked Out":



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Teel confesses: "I was watching a heist movie–I think it was Five Against the House—and it occurred to me that in all the heist films, the prime motivation of the protagonists is usually bad luck in their lives caused by a gambling addiction. And, of course, thinking they can fix all their problems with ‘one more job,’ ‘the biggest score yet’ is obviously still part of their addiction to the thrill of it."

TEEL JAMES GLENN, winner of the 2021 Best Novel from Pulp Factory Awards, 2012 Pulp Ark 'Best Author of the Year.' Epic ebook award finalist. Derringer Award finalist, P&E winner 'Best Thriller Novel',"Best Steampunk Short", Multiple finalist "Best Fantasy short stories," Collection" Member HWA, MWA, HNS, IATW, Private Eye Writers of America. Visit him at theurbanswashbuckler.com

David Cranmer

THE CONSPIRACY BUFF (IN THE AFTERMATH OF ROE V. WADE BEING OVERTURNED)

I think of all the conspiracies that you
readily accepted, pushed my way daily
as facts

but when I sent you links about the depraved,
brutal rape of a ten-year-old girl, you claimed,
“fake news!”

Until the rapist was jailed, and it was an
undeniable truth and you grew at once
silent

silent because it did not back your narrow
political and ugly Christofascist
prism.

You would not accept that many children have
dealt with such travesties on a regular
basis.

So, I am gladly extending the finger
to one lacking objective reality,
Fuck you!


David's YouTube video reading of "The Conspiracy Buff..."



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David confesses: "My poem isn't so much about abortion as it is people willing to believe anything, even in the face of a crime, to support their own beliefs, and how I've grown tired of individuals who have no critical thinking whatsoever."

DAVID CRANMER’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine, Live Nude Poems, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, LitReactor, Macmillan’s Criminal Element, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. His debut chapbook, Dead Burying the Dead Under a Quaking Aspen, is now available. He’s a dedicated Whovian who enjoys jazz and backgammon. He can be found in scenic upstate New York where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Matthew Sorrento

MAZE

When I take a break
from filing reports,
mostly surveillance,
to lean back in my chair
is when I see him

usually in a diner,
or sometimes
a trendy coffee shop
where he fits in
with a keyboard, headphones,
thinking about his next strike.

If someone approaches
he may give it all up,
each location, body—
or transform into
the person they want.
The sight of him
comes to me so easily,
without even closing
my eyes.

I want to reach into
his dreamscape, for
just a bit of the non-stop
reel in his mind.

Once I think I'm there,
he’s gone.


Matt's YouTube video reading of "Maze":



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Matt confesses: "In my research on serial killers in media, I've come across the common duality that we have about them, a fascination and revulsion. Our fascination makes the task of finding and apprehending them more complicated and difficult for officials. Their job, I'd imagine, also becomes something of an obsession and even a source of anxiety, in spite of their professionalism, which gave me a reference point for my poem."


MATTHEW SORRENTO s Editor-in-chief of Retreats from Oblivion (a journal of noir, crime, and mystery fiction and culture, where he contributes poetry) and Co-editor of Film International. He writes about and teaches film history and genre cinema at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. The author of The New American Crime Film (McFarland, 2012), his most recent book is David Fincher's Zodiac (co-edited with David Ryan, FDU Press, 2022).

Michael Zimecki

WANTED

Female,
23 years old, five and a half feet tall,
slender build, blue eyes and fair complexion,
auburn hair, bobbed, originally blonde,
with the following identifying scars and marks:
a tattoo of two hearts with an arrow on her right thigh;
a bullet wound near the little toe of her left foot;
scar tissue on her right leg from a burn she got
in an accident when they crashed a stolen car.
She’d been burned before, of course.
Roy was faithless and didn’t really love her,
not like Ronald Coleman loved Vilma Banky in The Night of Love.
“Let all men go to hell,” she wrote in her diary.
Then she met Clyde, and went to hell with him.
Truth be told, they didn’t have much in common
(she wrote poetry; he was practically illiterate)
but he’d tattooed the names of other lovers on his skin,
just like she had done with Roy.
It always felt crowded riding with him
With Anne on one arm,
Gladys on the other
and the arsenal splayed across the back seat like some drunken whore,
well-lubed and smelling of stripper solvents,
each of his beloved guns named for a different girl.
Truth of it is
she never really felt wanted.


Michael's YouTube video reading of "Wanted":



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Michael confesses: "I began with an image of a wanted poster for Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the most heavily romanticized couple in the history of crime. I never believed the myth, so I mentally photoshopped Clyde out of the picture, and this is what I came up with, my take on Bonnie Parker."

MICHAEL ZIMECKI is the author of Death Sentences, a novel published by Crime Wave Press, and a winner of the First Golden Fedora Poetry Prize from Noir Nation, an international crime fiction journal. His crime fiction has appeared in Close to the Bone Magazine, The Dark City Mystery Magazine, and Hoosier Noir, among other publications. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan.

Suzanne Ondrus

AND THE CHILDREN SING "MR. CARL BACH"

Mr. Carl Bach, Bach, Bach
under key and lock, lock, lock
under the sheriff’s eye, eye, eye
cause he slew Mrs. Bach, Bach, Bach

Just wanted to whip, whip, whip
his wife to agree, agree, agree
when not, he did the devil’s deed, deed, deed.
The law he didn’t heed, heed, heed.

Old Charley Dutchman, Dutchman, Dutchman
who bought wet land, wet land, wet land.
How people mocked, mocked, mocked
and so his troubles began, began, began,

till one night he flipped, flipped, flipped,
hacked Mary’s head to jelly, jelly, jelly,
cut her up like a weed, weed, weed
and killed the baby in her belly, belly, belly.

Oh, the crowd’s so dense, dense, dense!
Get a place at the fence, fence, fence
to see Carl up close, hang, hang, hang!
Come and pay your five cents, cents, cents!


*Inspired by the children’s clapping song “Miss Mary Mack”. This is meant as an audience participatory clapping song.


The Dark Room's YouTube video performance of "And the Children Sing...":



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Suzanne confesses: "I was struggling with rhyme and getting children’s perspectives on the murder. A friend suggested I look at clapping songs. It was such an odd juxtaposition, but one that let me envision how this news permeated the whole town, even filtered to young ears."

SUZANNE ONDRUS' first book, Passion Seeds, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Prize. She was Gordon Square Review’s 2022 runner up winner for prose, the 2013 Reed Magazine Markham Poetry Prize winner, a 2017 featured UNESCO World Book Capital poet in Guinea, Conakry, and a 2018-2020 Fulbright Scholar to Burkina Faso. Her work delves into love, desire, different cultures, history, racism, body image, African fashion, and women’s sexuality. Her forthcoming poetry book, Death of an Unvirtuous Woman (Finishing Line Press) from which these poems come, examines domestic violence and homicide in an 1881 Ohio German immigrant couple from Wood County. Hear her read on her YouTube channel Suzanne Ondrus and find her updates on suzanneondrus.com.

Peter M. Gordon

BAD HABITS

If I still smoked, now would be a good time to slip
outside, spark a match to tubed tobacco, suck blue

fumes into lungs, feel lazy alertness nicotine bestows.
After I stubbed out the butt I’d walk back in the bar,

order another scotch, neat. Luxuriate in slow spread
of warmth, from solar plexus to shoulders, toes, fingers.

It relaxes my gluteus maximus so I can sit on this stool
long enough to offer the tipsy blonde next to me

a drink. By then I’d be sure no woman could resist
my charms, yet invariably she would resist, pick up

her cosmo and stroll, unsteadily, to a high table a few
yards away. I’d gulp my scotch and follow, bar chatter

fading away as I tried to remember my best pickup line.
“What brings you to a place like this?” “He did,” she would

say, pointing at a barrel-chested barfly buzzing over fast,
twenty years younger, mad drunk. Instead of retreating I say,

“The lady’s with me, punk.” We go outside; instinct
helps me duck his first right, even land a couple jabs,

before a left crashes into my temple like a tire iron. Wake
in the alley, wobble home, ice on head, medicate with

a sea of Scotch, swear to quit -- until one day I did.
I’m safer now, hold a job – but it’s quiet. Very, very quiet.


Peter's YouTube video reading of "Bad Habits":



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Peter confesses: "Mark Twain said, 'Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.' That might work for some habits, like forgetting to shut lights out when you leave a room. This poem is about the bad habits that grab you by the throat so you must rip them out of your routine. They become such a part of your life that quitting them, even if you know you will be better for it, is like losing your best friend."

PETER M. GORDON is an award-winning poet with more than 100 poems published in various magazines and websites, and over one dozen poems on The Five-Two. He's authored two collections, Two Car Garage, and Let's Play Two: Poems About Baseball. Peter is a founder and current President of Orlando Area Poets, a chapter of the Florida State Poets Association. He teaches in Full Sail University's Film Production MFA program.

Robert Cooperman

THE HUSNOCK

A Star Trek: Next Generation episode
featured The Husnock: a race of highly
intelligent, incredibly brutal creatures;
but when they tried to destroy a small planet,
they faced the wrath of a previously pacifist
omnipotent being, and when they killed
his mortal wife and everyone else on his planet,
he confessed to Captain Picard
that he’d wiped out all the Husnock.

“What do you mean by all?” Picard,
with growing dread, demanded,
“all of the attacking ships?”

“No,” the being answered, “every last one
of them in the universe, all 50 billion.”

Forgive me, but I’d be tempted: starting
with Putin, his pals, his lick-spittle generals,
then the Russian army, which can't
defeat Ukraine, so is rendering it
into a giant, rubble-strewn body bag;
then every Russian who fell for
Putin’s bullshit propaganda, and then...

“You’d be doing,” you’d accuse, “exactly
what psycho-Putin and his goons did.”

If I were a better man, I’d agree.
But I’m not, so allow me my impotent
fantasy-rage, because at this point,
good riddance to bad fucking garbage.


Gerald So's YouTube video reading of "The Husnock":



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Bob confesses: "A few days before I wrote this poem, I was talking to a likewise Star Trek: Next Generation loving-friend and I remembered the episode with The Husnock, a race of utter brutes who really get theirs. I'd mentioned in passing that I wished someone would do a Husnock on Putin and his cronies and generals and the Russian army and all of them. The idea for a poem about the Russian invaders as present-day Husnock, and what Russia deserved, percolated in my head until it hit me how the poem had to go. It's kind of a riff on the thought game we played as kids: if you could go back in time and had total omnipotence, could you bring yourself to kill Hitler? Hell yeah."


ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collections are Go Play Outside (Apprentice House) and Reefer Madness (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Kelsay Books is A Nightmare on Horseback.

Charles Rammelkamp

TOTAL IMMERSION

Officer Nichols gave Betsy the option:
“If you let me baptize you,
I’ll let you go with a citation.”
He’d found marijuana in her car
when he stopped her for running a redlight.
Nichols told her God was talking to him.

Betsy didn’t want to go to jail.
She followed Nichols out to Duck Lake,
Nichols calling another cop, Ron Hayes,
to record the dunking on his cellphone,
Betsy’s wet t-shirt molding her breasts.

Later, Betsy sued.
“He touched my crotch
when he handcuffed me,” she claimed,
Nichols indicted on several dozen counts,
including rape, assault, official oppression.

That was in 2019,
the case repeatedly postponed,
because of the pandemic.
Now Betsy’s been found dead in her home,
a healthy 42-year-old woman,
the cause of her death unclear.


Charles's YouTube video reading of "Total Immersion":



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Charles confesses: "Where else but America? When I read about the Tennessee police officer coercing the woman he’d arrested into a “baptism” – which resembled a sexual assault more than a purification rite – and then about her mysterious death when she pressed charges, I was horrified at the same time that the incident sounded so familiar. The policeman has been involved in almost four dozen lawsuits including rape and “official oppression.” I did not read that he had been fired or suspended or even slapped on the wrist."

CHARLES RAMMELKAMP's latest poetry collection, The Field of Happiness, has just been published by Kelsay Books. Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip, and The Compulsive Reader.

Kelly Sargent

HER SHADOW

War-torn moon,
craters, sunken, through the lens:
Shadows that cannot Be, Papa had said, without the light.

An abandoned, skinned-knee teen follows her shadow,
fingers unseen that once fastened a golden charm on her bracelet:
a crescent moon, its craters in the dark.

Greasy bangs grown over her eyes—
hazel-flecked eyes, sunken like craters—
filter unspent sunlight.

Fingers, unseen and callous-tipped, grope her wrist and
pin it down—tender and bared—
one before the other onto the unsparing tar
that scorches her shadow’s edge.

Without light—her papa’s voice, now recalled—
your own shadow cannot Be.

She turns her head, her cheek pressed against the tar.
“My shadow, they cannot capture,” she whispers,
and my shadow is me.”


Gerald So's YouTube video reading of "Her Shadow":



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Kelly confesses: “The invasion of Ukraine reminded me of the heinous, often unspoken casualty of war - the rape and ravaging of women and children. I wanted to speak to the evil act of control perpetrated by conquering soldiers and authority figures that has been shamefully overlooked through the ages.”

KELLY SARGENT is the author of Lilacs & Teacups (Cyberwit, 2022) and Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion (Kelsay Books, 2022), a Cordella Press Poetry Chapbook contest finalist. Her poems and artwork, including a 2021 Best of the Net nominee, have appeared or are forthcoming in more than forty literary publications, including Typehouse Literary Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, and Newfound. She serves as the creative nonfiction editor of The Bookends Review, and has written for a national newspaper for the Deaf. She also reviews for an organization whose mission is to make visible the artistic expression of sexual violence survivors. Visit her at www.kellysargent.com

Jennifer Lagier

NOTHING IS NORMAL HERE

“Over the next two-and-a-half traumatic weeks, the Uvalde community will say goodbye to the 19 children and two teachers killed in a mass shooting.” –Huffington Post

In grammar school,
we practiced duck and cover,
huddled under clunky desks,
laughable attempts to survive
being vaporized by nuclear missiles.
Might as well kiss our asses goodbye,
bigger kids used to joke.
Now ten-year-olds wear backpacks
that double as bullet proof vests,
rehearse active shooter drills.

One young girl describes smearing
her wounded body with a murdered friend’s blood,
plays dead to avoid additional bullets,
watches classmates, teachers slaughtered
during the hour they were trapped in a room
with a teen wielding an AR-15
while police waited outside.

Politicians who receive
the largest NRA contributions
deliver limp platitudes,
empty hopes, stale prayers.

Nothing changes.
More lives are lost.


Jennifer's YouTube video reading of "Nothing is Normal Here":



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Jennifer confesses: "After reading that headline in the Huffington Post, my frustration at the lack of action on the part of our lawmakers despite the escalating number of shootings in this country, many involving children, boiled over. I had to write this poem and hope enough of us are willing to protest, write, pressure, vote, or whatever it takes to get our NRA-bought-off politicians out of office and sane gun control legislation passed."

JENNIFER LAGIER has published nineteen books, in a variety of anthologies and literary magazines, edits the Monterey Poetry Review, helps coordinate Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Second Sunday readings. Recent books: Meditations on Seascapes and Cypress (Blue Light Press) and COVID Dissonance (CyberWit), Camille Chronicles (FutureCycle Press). Website: https://jlagier.net, Facebook: www.facebook.com/JenniferLagier/

Tony Dawson

A MODERN FRANKENSTEIN

Limping towards me was a sad amputee
as if he had been in an accident or three.
He’d lost his right leg and his left arm,
“How on earth did you come to suffer such harm?”

“It was the surgeon’s price for a liver,” he said.
because without a new liver I would be dead.
“I had to trade in two limbs and pay cash
Like trading a car in, though you might think it rash.”

“Why does the surgeon need an arm and a leg?”
“To put a limb on a sailor whose leg is a peg.”
And as I was wondering where this would all end,
he added, “in exchange for a kidney and money to spend.”

As for the arm, the waiting list’s a long one!
and dear old sawbones would never shun
those needing two, so as to hug their wives
even if they flinch when they see his knives.”

It’s a funny old world where people will part
with chunks of their bodies to get a new heart,
and having to settle the balance with pots
of money just for the surgeon to buy a few yachts.


Tony's YouTube video reading of "A Modern Frankenstein":



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Tony confesses: "The theme of this poem was triggered when I read that an 82-year-old surgeon admitted to withdrawal symptoms because he hadn’t been able to perform transplants during the pandemic. Then I thought of the poor in other countries who were obliged to sell one of their kidneys to survive financially…"

TONY DAWSON has lived in Seville since 1989. His writing has appeared in print in Critical Survey, Shoestring Press, Poems-for-All, Chiron Review, Pure Slush and Loch Raven Review, as well as online at London Grip, The Five-Two, The Syndic Literary Journal, Horror Sleaze and Trash, Cajun Mutt Press, Poetry and Covid, Beatnik Cowboy, and Home Planet News.

Sharon Waller Knutson

BLACK-EYED SUSAN

After the Garden of Eden prophet dies,
two men in suits carry her out
of the commune down to the road,
her long goldilocks waving in the wind.
yellow dress dragging in the dirt,
dark eyes darting like a rabbit
as they deposit her outside the gate
and she yanks on the chains, Let me
back in, she calls, I can’t breathe.

The prophet taught us to stay inside,
that the air outside was poison gas.
She takes a deep breath of the ocean
air as we walk along the beach
near the Encinitas weekly newspaper
where she writes headlines instead
of making them and I write stories
a decade after the scandal broke.

In pantyhose and skirt to her knees,
her hair its natural brown, Jeanette,
her birth name, recalls the day
she meets the prophet and her life changes.
His hypnotic green eyes stared
right into my soul, and she boards.
his Volkswagen bus for Laramie
right after graduation from Colorado State.

He names female followers after flowers.
I was his favorite, she says, which is why
his widow had her cast out. The cult leaves
Escondido shortly after that for Des Moines.
I would have done anything for him, she says.

Two decades later, I wonder if she
would have ingested a Euthanasia cocktail,
lay down on her bunk and waited
for a spaceship to beam her up
to Heaven in the Rancho Santa Fe
mansion like the thirty-eight followers
of another prophet with hypnotic eyes.


Gerald So's YouTube video reading of "Black-Eyed Susan":



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Sharon confesses: "After watching documentaries of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate, I recalled a fellow journalist I worked with who was thrown out of a cult and wondered if she joined another one."

SHARON WALLER KNUTSON is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014) and What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021) and Survivors, Saints and Sinners forthcoming by Cyberwit. Her work has also appeared in Black Coffee Review, Terror House Review, Trouvaille Review, ONE ART, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review, and The Song Is...

Tad Tuleja

TAKE NO PRISONERS

Two months into the special operation, Mariupol in ruins
and millions exiled, the news shows a clip of a man and a body
lying in the street where the invaders left it. The man—an aid
worker or a neighbor—pauses before rolling it into a bag
to cut the fetter binding the victim’s wrists.

In that small reverence, hope crawls weary from Pandora’s jar
and the dominion of the unholy is briefly undone. I give thanks for
that man’s decency even as I recall that the 20,000 Poles
killed at Katyn died according to the same grotesque formula:
bound then shot in the head by hollow men.

Now, as in 1940, the killers were following orders from afar—
the grey seats of power near Saint Basil’s. I wonder, when they got
home, what icons they kissed, what penances they mumbled, what
words they used when, holding their children’s hands, they spoke
of Mother Russia and righteous battle.


Tad's YouTube video reading of "Take No Prisoners":



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Tad confesses: "This poem, inspired by seeing film of a man cutting free the bound wrists of a murdered Ukrainian civilian, asks the reader to consider what a 'no prisoners' policy does, not just to its victims but to the soldiers who are ordered to carry it out."

TAD TULEJA is a Texas-based folklorist and songwriter with interests in the Hollywood Western, honor cultures, and the mythology of violence. He has written or edited thirty books, including novels and nonfiction works on language, history, popular culture, and military traditions. His thoughts on nationalism inform his weekly podcast Skirmishes with Patriotism. The recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant for his song cycle Skein of Arms, he performs his songs on YouTube under the name Skip Yarrow.

Pamela Hobart Carter

CONVERSION

The first boy interested in me,
in his thirties, was convicted
of murdering his estranged wife.
Have the decades of incarceration
returned him to human form?
A writer friend served a stint
for armed robbery, after which
he did become a decent citizen.
You’re not convinced.
Change seems unlikely.

What alters any of us?

An article covering ills of certain lipids?
Do we read, then swear off cocoa butter,
or eat more of it? Either way, but this
is about content at the epicenters
of our self-ness. Soul conversion, not diet.

Don’t you wonder how this confinement
may cause shifts in our covert cosmoses,
far below skin? Astral quakes.
Murkinesses of dark matter reallocating opacity.
Critical gravitational densities coagulating.
Leading us to a black hole brink.

Or its converse.

There is a chance we emerge
convalesced.
Emotional timidity forsaken.
Raring to convey each desire,
converse with every cousin,
compose a daily glow.

We cry
for those who cannot recover.
Converge in a ring, a coven to honor existence.

On our long walk to the waterfront,
where a seal suns on the boat launch,
and back uphill through that strip
of urban green, I ask, “Is it naïve?”
and listen for sarcasm.
None comes.


Pamela's YouTube video reading of "Conversion":



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Pamela confesses: "When writing poems about my love life, I decided to Google that first boy interested in me and reeled: he had murdered his estranged wife with a crossbow. This discovery, mixed with our Covid experiences, prompted this poem. (Today I looked him up again: released from prison, after 29 years.)"

Photo by Omar Willey

After earning two degrees in geology, PAMELA HOBART CARTER taught science, art, and preschool for thirty-plus years. On the side she wrote plays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction. Now she writes full-time and teaches on the side. A dozen of her plays have been read or staged in Seattle (her home), Montreal (her childhood home), and Fort Worth (never her home). She has two poetry chapbooks, Her Imaginary Museum (Kelsay Books, 2020) and Held Together with Tape and Glue (Finishing LIne Press, 2021).

Rena J. Worley

THE PURGE

Firm stride marches a worn grass aisle
Between dated names on upright stones
Incomplete history stamped on lifetimes
Of personal accomplishment
Or innocence molester

Agony searches with frenzied gaze
For detested loathsome pervert
Molding slab detected, knees fold
To soft earth never settled
Rutted dirt mudded puddle

Whispered chant escalates to raving scream
Whitening fists pound ground rhythm
Accompaniment to condemnation
Exhausted rant falls forward limp
Speechless, motionless

Weary expunger wavering stands

Departing defiled spits a sealing curse
“Be damned you Bastard,
May hell’s hurricane beat you forever”


RJ's YouTube vido reading of "The Purge":



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Rena confesses: "Abuse in any form has no excuse. Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal. So often these events hide in silence. The victim shamed, guilted, angered. Years pass and the ability or opportunity to confront the abuser is taken from the wounded. No closure. Perhaps screaming and Dante’s hell help balance the equation."

RENA J. WORLEY is a Word Artist residing in rural Michigan. She began publishing in the Five-Two on May 27, 2019.

Carolynn Kingyens

DUPER'S DELIGHT

Lying is the most fun a girl can have
without taking her clothes off,
but it's better if you do.

— Alice, from the film Closer


A liar tells me
there is no such
thing as the truth,
that truth is as fluid
as sex.

The liar says
This is my truth
and everyone
believes her.

The liar says
I am the victim here
and no questions
are asked.

The problem,
she says,
is my perception
as if truth is
something we could trap
under a glass
the way we trap light beams
and insects.

Lies, she says,
travels faster
than the speed
of light.

She says the truth
has many sides
like a shiny diamond
on the finger
of a Las Vegas
blackjack dealer.

She says the truth
has many sides
like a colossal glacier
in the middle of
Antarctica.

She says truth
is a shit show,
a dumpster fire
in the middle
of a tin-roof trailer park
some twenty miles
from the nearest highway
in flood-prone Florida.

Truth is ugly,
the fat friend,
the sidekick
who never gets laid.

Lying, she says,
is a luxury
I can never afford.


Carolynn;s YouTube video reading of "Duper's Delight":



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Carolynn confesses: "Have you ever tried to win an argument with a pathological liar? Better yet, have you ever tried nailing JELL-O to a wall? In both these scenarios, I can assure you that you will lose; you may even lose your mind. The truth is ugly. It's messy and complicated — a shit show. In my naive efforts to trap the truth, I'd attempt to hone a memory that rivaled Rain Man's. My memory would become an anchor in the chaos, or so I thought. But I quickly realized that the truth doesn't matter because truth is perception. 'What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change. It's the currency of the world.' — Dan, from the film Closer"

CAROLYNN KINGYENS is the author of Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound and the newly released Coupling, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble (Brooklyn), McNally Jackson, and Book Culture. In addition to poetry, Kingyens writes essays, book and film reviews, flash fiction and short stories. Her short story “Bye-Bye, Miss American Pie” was one of fifteen stories selected by Across the Margin, a Brooklyn arts and culture webzine, for their Best of Fiction 2021 list.

Harris Coverley

RED ON SILVER

It's running right out of me...running right out, beside me, onto the floor. I did nothing to him...I walked past him, the pallid and wiry guy in the hoodie leaning against the post...he asked me something, I didn’t quite get it. He pulled his right hand out of his left pocket...I felt the blade in me before I saw it retract: red on silver, shining in the streetlight, the flash of neon. And now it’s running right out of me...pooling at my side. I’m accosted by soft voices...a stranger’s coat dragged over me, smelling of alien sweat, bitter and foul, but I can’t complain. There is murmuring and chatter and whispers and giggles...the screaming has stopped, not mine of course...I don’t have much energy left to scream, or even to mumble. And it’s still running right out of me...on and on. Everything around me is a ghost, an outline, a rough blur. There’s a flashing blue light either a million metres or a thousand miles away that refuses to come any closer, and a woman with dyed black hair and dull green eyes in a white leather jacket whom I’ve never met before keeps telling me that it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay...okay, okay...and yet still...it’s running right out of me...into the gutter and down the drain...all those years, waiting for the languorous rain to come out of the blue night and wash it all away...


Harris's YouTube video reading of "Red on Silver":



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Harris confesses: "This is actually a complete re-write of a poem from several years ago. There had been a massive spate of stabbings across Britain, and having just been walking around the city centre the realisation came to me that there was no particular reason why I couldn’t possibly be a victim."


"Along with previously in The Five-Two, HARRIS COVERLEY has had verse published in Polu Texni, California Quarterly, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, Scifaikuest, Novel Noctule, Better Than Starbucks, Corvus Review, The Cannon's Mouth, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, View From Atlantis, and many others. He lives in Manchester, England.