19-10

This Be The Glass

with a nod to Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, both red and white,
but much more pleasantly than brew.
They fill you with a sense of right
and righteousness known but to few.

Grapes pressed in the traditional way
and slowly aged in old-world oak—
the crisp, the rich, the round bouquet,
a hint of citrus, cherry, smoke.

Without a glass, we may sink into
mournfulness, gloom, gravitas.
Surely, it is no great sin to
drink! In vino veritas!

by Antonia Clark

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Antonia Clark, a medical writer and editor, has also taught creative writing and manages an online poetry workshop. Her full-length poetry collection, Chameleon Moon (2014) will be reissued in 2019 by Bellevue Books. Toni lives in Vermont, loves wine, travel, and French café music. Contact antoniaclarkpoetry@gmail.com or visit antoniaclark.com.

19-9

École des Beaux Arts

About suffering you were never wrong,
Pale Icarus: how unformed, hardly conscious yet,
So young, you stuck the feathers on,
Compliant with the old magician's wish, faith in him strong;
Then flapped about to get the feel of your new wings,
Leapt finally from a peak, soared ecstatically
So near the sun you surfed the tides of superstrings;
Then felt the soft wax melt and run, thin rivulet,
Along each arm, an interesting feeling, drip from elbows,
Wrists, and fingers grasping through the heat to gather back
The scattered feathers, reveling as each new sensation grows,
Not sensible, as yet, you'd fall—There's no such thing as suffering—toward black
Inkwell, the canon of American and English poetry.

In Auden's Musée, for instance: where a reader learns
About the ploughman and the ship, not how it burns
To recognize the feathers held one up, and view
Abruptly, with new eyes, that suffering is sure as gravity,
As unrelenting as one's innocence had been,
And what an unenviable position one was in;
For this we'd have to go to school to you
Yourself, who made that splash so few would see.

by Dan Campion

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Dan Campion lives in Iowa City. His poetry has appeared previously in Parody and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and other journals. He is a co-editor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. A third edition will launch in Spring 2019 to honor Whitman's 200th birthday.

19-8

Three Limericks

The President's lunch, a Big Mac,
fell onto the ground from its sack.
Since they're not all that great,
I'm relieved to relate,
that a Bassett Hound brought it right back.


A artist who sits by the Seine
does the same thing again and again.
Since people are buying,
he's kept on supplying
no matter how boring it's been.


A bookkeeper quite underpaid
got his wife a new house and a maid.
His scheme came unwound
when an auditor found
that some profits had gone unrelayed.

by Phil Huffy

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Phil Huffy had a long career doing something other than writing. He was quite surprised to find his work accepted in a variety of print and online publications and loves to Google himself. He scribbles away at his kitchen table in Rochester, NY, and much prefers those little saltines they make to the regular size.