Sharon Perkins Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Places, Kestrel, Meridian, Broad River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Salvation South, and others. Her second poetry collection “A Legacy of Birds” is available on Amazon and her third collection “Sweeping the Porch”(Pine Row Press) will be published early 2026.
If you’d met him on a Greyhound bus in 1962 he’d have asked you to look out for Kerouac on every corner or find Mickey Mouse beneath a palm tree sweeping streets with brooms that danced themselves to life at parties just for you If he was drunk he’d drizzle Steinback over Shakespeare, float O’Casey’s Irish brogue on top of Tennessee, and wait for Godot with you if you got lonely on the carpet in your underwear and cowboy hat. Later he’d pour method into Montague, muddle warnings up with wanderlust, be once again Big … Continue reading My Father the Mixologist by Mara Lee Grayson→
Nonna tends Dad and Auntie in three room railroad flat; Bathtub in kitchen, 3′ x 5′ plywood tabletop, fridge at foot of bed, toilet in outside hallway with overhead waterbox and cold, wet chain hanging for the flush that suburban cousin Gina never could figure out how to use. Nonna fork-kneads one-inch pillows of dough filled with cheese, parsley, and beef. Tasted wonderful, even if too-many eggs and over-cooking meant they fell apart in grease-speckled broth. “Al Dente” could have been an opera singer, for all Nonna knew. She could not cook Italian: The ravioli … Continue reading Love Not Cheaply by Giancarlo Malchiodi→
In the century most recently expired, pigments to suggest certain fruits and vegetables were infused into the metal of appliances, plastic tableware, canisters for sugar and flour, even the weave in carpet fibers. These were part of a concurrent affronts to taste including deleted expletives of Presidents, the Fonz scowling at a juke box, gas lines, fear of toilet paper shortages. Then that ancient ‘fridge began leaking coolants. You could have bought new seals, a refill of freon, but there was a virgin Master Card for such crises. The clearance floor model was the only … Continue reading Avocado by Christopher Dungey→
I pattern through my day first thing, I walk across the green geometry of my rug telling myself I will stay on course, breathe rhythmically coffee myself up to start up my inner waves of can-do coming and going through tasks written on my straight-line list repeat my regularities shower myself with adulthood stand among the trees living above underground networks feel their energy, take in the reliabilities of exchange somewhat ready for small differences and changes in the flow and spiraling of conversations with the known and the unknown who may try to sprinkle … Continue reading Framework by Susan Shea→
I wore a turquoise donkey bead on a thong around my neck— choker, bead and knot resting in the space between collarbones. Glass eye facing outward from my wrist pupil of deep blue defending against malevolence that wandered high school halls. Perhaps forgetting to say “Rabbit Rabbits” before opening eyes on the first day of the month explained everything. I have a fitness tracker clipped to my shirt as if I could outrun the apocalypse pocket full of dog treats to throw to the beast. Alison Hicks’s latest collection of poems is Homing. She was … Continue reading Portrait with Amulets by Alison Hicks→
Yesterday, I ate a lion for free, an elephant for the asking; and a leopard for my pleasure. I ate when I was not hungry, hunger stitched me into pieces and I could not eat. Hawkers and market women pleaded with me to accept a river, with two skies for a discount. If I decided to pay for an ocean, even the sea would flow along. Wherever my shadow fell, there the world was my limit. Now, the cub of a lion hides from me and the young elephant sharpens his teeth; though I was … Continue reading Shadows of their Bones by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah→
At the Concourse End of the Sky Bridge Discombobulated by my inability to sleep on a plane arcing across the wind-tossed top edge of Europe, the next thing I know we are making an unscheduled stop and I’m in a stop-and-start line where each passenger is being greeted in their native language by a woman who, when I get to her (she’s smiling) says to me, Welcome Good Morning, and I walk away marveling at not only the urge I am feeling to return to the back of the line so I can hear her … Continue reading At the Concourse-End of the Sky Bridge and Can I Pay Next Month What I Owe This Month?, 2 poems by Ben Sloan→
It is two weeks past Mother’s Day, late afternoon, when I see a doe on the neighboring pasture. Light slices across the grass from its peach horizon, nearly blinding. Around the fringes of haze, I see there is also a tiny fawn with noodle-like legs behind the doe, and a few feet away, the neighbor’s small bulldog bluff-barking the two of them. The doe does something that I’ve never seen her do before in her elegant tiptoe strolls—she lifts one leg and hooves the ground, then the other leg, same motion. Her head thrusts forward … Continue reading Finding Isabella by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
……………………………………………..Collision risks are growing every year ……………………………………………..as the number of objects in orbit ……………………………………………..around Earth proliferate. ………………………………………………………………………—CNN How can prayers make it through 130 million pieces of space junk careening and colliding at 18,000 miles per hour in an orbital graveyard bits of broken satellites, the remains of booster rockets and wreckage from weapons tests As violence spreads like head lice more and more prayers swirl the skies jostling and jiggling to make it to heaven and petition the Lord please one night without sirens ………….wailing us awake let my daughter learn to walk ………….on … Continue reading Space Junk by Claire Scott→
for Caitlin Daughtered with the dogwood’s dirge, we expect love to have seasons, ceaseless in its business of change, inconsistency its own persistence. Gravity and petals disclose the antiromance of an age ahead of innocence. The syllables in neglect are more dutiful than parents. Undaughtered onomatopoetics: the how creak of the floorboards, the could you of stiff hinges, a question mark of dust motes. When the father left, the river branched into three and she took a city of bridges. Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tenn., with her partner … Continue reading running like water by Maggie Rue Hess→
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