The Indian Spy

The Indian spy wanted to be like Ethan Hunt, but his name did not quite have a similar ring to it,

He wanted to remain ageless, but the unlicensed clinic botched his plastic surgery,

He wanted to keep running over rooftops made of treacherous glass, leaping from one building to another

But the police did not give him permission.

The Indian spy dreamt off jumping off cliffs in foreign lands, of fist fights with international spies on the crumbling exteriors of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

But VFS did not give him an appointment.

The Indian spy chose to accept the mission but could not defuse the bomb in time.

He was on, what they call, Indian time.

He was like that only.

Always next life for the Indian Spy.

Aakash Karkare is a writer, translator and filmmaker based in Mumbai. He has written for Scroll, Business Standard, Architectural Digest, and Quartz. His stories have ranged from food, and culture, to architecture and city spaces.

Flag

It’s nights like this I ask myself,

what is a flag? A fluttering

symbol of a nation’s amplified

psychosis. A blood-drenched rag

dipped at the passing catafalque.

A handkerchief to wave at the

soldiers marching off to war,

marching against human failure.

Run it up the pole and see who

salutes it. Use it for swaddling,

a bandage after an accident, to

mop the feverish brow of one

unwell. A thing to dry your hands

on after throwing in the towel.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.

The milk-bottle

night falls

and light

falls from doors

and from second-

floor windows

like a long

row of milk-

bottles, shelved

in an over-

packed fridge.

toppling

on cleanly

mopped tile

around toenails,

spreading

and distinct

over granite

pavement paths.

DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as "a cosmopolitan poet" and another as "prolific, bordering on incontinent". His work has nominated twelve times for Best of the Net, eight for the Pushcart Prize and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections; "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016), "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)

You’re not on the list

The stars aren’t out. You are

my height, patchy beard, bouncer

with a belly, barely concealed

sweatshirt miller lite stains,

shouting at me that I’m not on the list.

Don’t piss on the bouncer. Punch him

instead of me, it’s Drew

with two knuckles, out of shape

bouncer, I’m sorry,

I didn’t mean to ruin your night.

Greyson Fisher is a rabbit hole. A sophomore at W&M he specializes in long fiction and poetry while maintaining a grasp on reality. His late uncle once told his dad, “never let this kid stop telling stories.” To this day Greyson has not stopped exporting escapism

Hunting License

(upon Kandinsky)

1.1 Stab a crow for good measure

1.12 Ladle the blood with care

1.13 Beware Void-like Nouns

1.14 And resolve NOTHING

1.15 Get back to things

at hand

1.16 For instance

dead matter

1.17 Conceals its own freight

1.18 Clean your sight/

transport a snappy knife

1.19 For appearance

2.0 Fold all bones

in lipshtick red

the moon Cobalt blue

Gordon’s DREAM WIND was published 2020 (Spirit-of-the-Ram), GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH (Mellen), while EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE received RIVERSTONE P Poetry Prize (AZ). Work appears in AGNI, American Literary R, Cincinnati PR, Mississippi R, New York Q, Phoebe, RHINO, Sonora R, Texas Observer, several nominated for Pushcarts. His eighth book, EMPTY, will be published Winter 2023/2024, BLUE BUSINESS, a chapbook (and maybe more), is in-progress.

Trees Again

We can hear the sounds of

an arboreal bacchanal somewhere

beyond the light of the day,

exclamations of dirty delight mixed with

the whistles of breathless shadows,

and the mutiny of hieroglyphic geese

surprised by the dark clouds.

A mare with a shaved mane

smokes the pipe of her totem,

and the winds avoid the shapes of the air.

Yes, I do love the void

under the streetlamps.

Ivan Peledov lives in Colorado. His poems have been published in Unlikely Stories Mark V, Fevers of the Mind, Pif Magazine, Book of Matches, Active Muse, Eunoia Review, and many other magazines. He is the author of the book Habits of Totems (Impspired, 2021).

Short and Sweet

Rosie's fine legs

under the barstool;

loved

by how many midgets?

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.

Roller Coaster

Please Read This Sign First

WARNING!

you must be at least this tall
to read the rest of this poem

to be honest though

i once knew a chinese woman
who was only this tall

her name is may

born in shanghai

now living in florida

but anyway
she read this poem

-- i tried to warn her! --

and yet she went on
to lead a perfectly normal life

with a little help from a chiropractor
now and then

Michael Edwards is a newly retired college professor, living in Florida. Recently, with more time on his hands, he has been publishing more than ever. His most recent publication is a micro story, 70 words long, titled "The Way of a Nun," in Paragraph Planet.

I Make Dough, Not Rainbows
*From the perspective of a social worker in Singapore

Tonight, I stand alone

between blocks of this unloved street.

Some rowdy neighbour strums his guitar;

it is no hymn to the strange worker, raised middle-class,

over-run now by work and word. Yet, what improvisation it is,

aural-life to the soul that sings, who, still

hears & hopes.

Now, strange worker, once a bard, how are you now like this?

You say you are now interested in botany? Was it the girl who fed you tea

leaves?

Yet, who said that flowers may not bud & grow this year? Is it wrong to

hope?

A doting gaze and a pail in hand, botanist and flower, meeting daily;

from afar, some say that they are tangled like weeds. Others say that a man’s

loving daily gaze is anxiety.

But what is it about the fluttering beauty of love

that people may not first see? Like how awkward but gentle

the path of wind-carried dandelion seeds. Like how God breathes aslant to

stroke the speck of dirt in-between tight edges of walls, where to clean, is,

they-say unrealistic. Tirelessly, a parent looks upon a child, as God on us; the

earth turns. The sun beams and burns for all of us; burning out,

but it is not stillborn.

Rainfall on the hardened estate’s soil, where roots
clutch on recycled rubbish. And some pigeons perch
on the ant-trailed rail, webbed feet & they cleave onto a stiff track;
I now raise my cup of osmanthus tea.
And pray, in this 9-5 job, community-imposter,
I want to meet a smuggler of hope, of rosy e-cigars
or shooting stars.

Perhaps, I did.

This afternoon, I saw a rainbow: some looked up, in cloudy
wonder, and say, there is hope. Yet, the bakers from a nearby shop-house,
working here, estate-old, exhale, ‘I’m not god;
I ought to only make dough,
not rainbows.’

Notes

1. Line 3, Cf. “Here in the long unlovely street, / Doors, where my heart was used to
beat / So quickly…” in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Dark House.
2. Line 25, Cf. T S Eliot’s The Waste Land

Mitt Ann is a writer/poet based in Singapore. Influenced by T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott and Marianne Moore, his poems have been published in various literary journals. His works can be found at mitt-ann.com.