Director, Andromeda Simulations International, Bahamas: a global education company providing online and in-person workshops in business finance.
Series Editor, Sampson Low's 'Potcake Chapbooks'. Formal verse about traveling, family, love, etc...
It matters to me, much more than it should, that drinking glasses stand sorted by size, that bowls are neatly nested, that my good dessert plates sparkle in their stack. The prize that perfect order grants is hard to name. It isn’t peace, exactly, but a sort of temporary triumph in a game that never ends, played not on field or court but on these shelves, a three-dimensional ungridded Scrabble board where dishes make the words, unspellable but meaningful; a plate misplaced means an unsettling break in symmetry and sense. Neatness may not win much, but there are times it’s all I’ve got.
*****
Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away (2025). Her work has been awarded the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors.
When The End came, it was not the end– it never is; the universe continues. The millions died; I stand alone, no friend; alone, but healthy in my bones and sinews. One keeps on, staunchly, soldierly at post, your day-to-day as other days have been… though the past world (or you) is just a ghost, a relic, fragment, hint, more felt than seen. I’ve lived beyond my time; my world has gone, my car-charged streets, my teeming meeting rooms, the close-packed skyline-scrapers now redrawn as nascent forest, trees standing as tombs where flocks of birds replace friends whose lives fled, with ghostly unseen me alone not dead.
*****
‘Last Building Standing’ is a Shakespearean sonnet, first published by The Orchards Poetry Journal. The Winter 2025 issue is now live on Amazon, as well as the Kelsay Books website.
Night-train noises, muffled and low, nights when the Northern Limited left. Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow, a distant dissonance, treble-cleft. Languid in summer, dulled in snow, it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest. The night world works on a steady clock. The barges ride on the river’s crest; at port in Duluth, the grain ships dock, and a streetlamp lit at the end of the block looks in at the window’s blind from the west–
I never learned: Did the schedule skew departure times into daylight hours, or did neighbors grouse, as neighbors do, that living close to a loud sound sours tempers and lives? I never knew, but it’s not there now, though we still see track. The freeway sound and the freeway grime color the nights. The snow turns black, and the block club frets over rising crime, and the sweet illusion of changeless time, though I wish for it fiercely, will not come back.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “When I wrote this poem, I was still participating on online poetry boards. I recall that there was a certain amount of argument about what a train–horn or whistle?–actually sounds like. The disappearance of the nightly sound has, in fact, a prosaic explanation: the schedule did change, and the station itself was moved to a downtown location. The name of the train route is fictional, chosen for alliterative purposes.”
‘Lament for the Midnight Train’ was first published in The Times (UK, online); appeared in the chapbook ‘Dissonance’; and is collected in ‘Street View’.
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.
Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010.
Der Arme Poet (best-known painting by Carl Spitzweg, 1839)
If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme, (with thought and frowns, it can’t be very hard), I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
O, gradus ad parnassum. One quick climb. I’ll be crème de la crème and avant-garde, if only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.
Top hat, cravat and walking stick meantime are ready—attributes to reap regard. I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
No more damp attic life; no fleas or grime. My poem will be perfection—a petard! If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.
My peers will shout, “Alors, a paradigm! Such lofty wit, a wise camelopard.“ I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
I bite my quill: crime, slime, Mülheim, enzyme. The world will bow, salute and call me bard. If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme, I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
*****
Janice D.Soderling writes: “This poem is ekphrastic, generated from a preceding work of art. “About the mysterious motor that generates, I can say little. But no composer, artist, poet, sculptor works ex nihilo. Earliest man, woman, looked at their handprint, their footprint, and a thought rose, an urge to express what they felt – a primitive fear of death perhaps – and off they went to the caves to imprint their hand, or to carve a footprint on the rockface by the sea. A shout-out that Kilroy was here. “We hear music in the babbling brook, in the sighing wind, in the raindrop falling from leaf to leaf and plopping into the puddle below. There is poetry in the emotive sounds we make and hear: tinkling laughter, cooing seduction, growling rage, keening sorrow, barking grief. Of such, language is made; of language Shakespeare made Sonnet 73. “All art is imitation, from birdsong to a symphony orchestra, from the walking stride to the metrical verse. All art is a denial of death. Even the comic art.“
Janice D. Soderling is an American–Swedish writer who lives in a small Swedish village. Over the years, she has published hundreds of poems, flash and fiction, most recently at Mezzo Cammin, Eclectica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Tipton Poetry Journal. Collections issued in 2025 are The Women Come and Go, Talking (poems) and Our Lives Were Supposed to Be Different (short stories).
‘The Poor Poet’ was originally published in American Arts Quarterly, and republished in the current Well Met, where links at the bottom will take you to other poets in the issue.
Pic credit: Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet (via Wikipedia)
I have never in my lives Met a girl named Arabella – Captain Blood, the lucky fella, Took them all to be his wives.
I have never been reborn As a pirate quartermaster – Long John Silver, lucky bastard, Shouldered me aside with scorn.
I had never – strange but true – Had a chance to rape and pillage; Takes a crew to burn a village, Takes much gold to get that crew.
So for now let’s all enjoy Cold and wet northeastern snow, How and why – we’ll never know… Yahrr, my mates, and chips ahoy.
*****
Vadim Kagan writes: “We were visiting BVI, and I had this wonderful morning ritual – walking along the beach to the coffee shop, and then dragging a beack chair to the water so that my feet were in the surf… and coming up with a poem or two watching the sun rise and the clouds change colors. Since childhood I’ve been a huge fan of Rafael Sabatini’s “Captain Blood” novels, so the first two lines just happened, and then the rest kinda followed. I think back home the forecast called for snow that day, so the contrast was again already there for me to make use of.”
Vadim Kagan writes poetry and prose in English and Russian. Vadim’s poems, bringing together traditions of Russian and English metered verse, have been put to music and performed by local and international artists. His poems have been published in The Lyric, Founders Favorites, The Road Not Taken, the Lost Love chapbook and recently in the Maryland Bards Poetry Review 2025. Vadim lives in Bethesda, MD, where he runs an AI company providing advanced technology capabilities to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.
You swore at me and hurled your ring into the pond then drove off back to London “for some bloody fun” with friends whose Chelsea coven held you in its bond. I was next in, scored twelve and hit the winning run.
The beers were long and cool, the Captain shook my hand. Dusk shaded in, a final liquid blackbird sang. A coughing tractor crawled a strip of fading land. An owl flew low across the pitch, a church bell rang.
Two muddy urchins with a shrimp-net dredged the pond their hopeful piping rippling in the cooling air while you choked on exhaust at Guildford or beyond along your golden road to Knightsbridge and Sloane Square.
Another world and just two perfect hours away your eyes had been bright green. Or brown. Or were they blue? I still recall the details of that Summer day so much more clearly than I now remember you.
*****
Martin Parker writes: “The only point I might add is my hope that if the muddy urchins’ dredging efforts were rewarded they were not too disappointed to learn that the ring’s diamond might not have been a real one! The intervening sixty-five-plus years have, mercifully, erased the fact that I may have been nothing but a cheapskate!”
‘Man of the Match’ was first published in Snakeskin.
Martin Parker is a writer of mainly light and humorous verse much of which has appeared in national publications including The Spectator, The Oldie and The Literary Review. In 2008 Martin founded the quarterly light verse webzine, Lighten Up Online at www.lightenup-online.co.uk, now edited by Jerome Betts. His website at www.martinparker-verse.co.uk gives details and excerpts from his two “hopefully humorous and only occasionally wrily depressing books”.
All systems are failing shadows flicker around the darkened room
There is no captain to report to, I am he.
Lost among the leaves.
*****
Poet, author, editor, publisher and digital creator Anthony Watkins passed away this week after a long illness. I knew him only through his creation of Better Than Starbucks, the wonderfully broad tent poetry-fiction-and-interviews magazine that came out monthly and provided for writers of all styles. It was a generous and inclusive publication, well reflective of its creator.
The poem above is one of the last messages posted by Anthony Watkins on his Facebook page, as everything was winding down.
At night we dream to clean our memory, discard trash from our cache. Reincarnating after death would be the same; the past, scraped by death’s emery, unknown in the new game, cleansed of our memories, but with a stash of added skills… and karma’s unpaid bills.
*****
No, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in anything, or in nothing; I’m an absolute agnostic. “I think therefore I am” is as far as you can go with any certainty – even “who or what I am” is ultimately unknown.
‘Clearing the Cache’ was published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb (if you exist, of course…)
Dear Mother come softly across your grey veil and onto the path in the dark where the snail is crossing obliquely and nightjars sing sweetly and put down your toilet bag quietly, discreetly on the rim of the cemetery fountain. Now wash your hair free of this mud and these worms, and squash those white maggots that gleam in your ears, then smile as you used to. We’ll have no more tears.
*****
Andrew Sclater writes: “I think everyone who loses a parent probably wants to resurrect them somehow. But memory is a false friend. We can’t see them clearly enough: we know, with vagueness, what they were like, but not who they were. We’d like to go back but we can’t, though this poems attempts to. Then, the realisation that we stand alone, orphaned, comes slowly, painfully and (awkward as it is) angrily as we grieve. This poem was delivered almost complete to me. It simply flowed out of the first line in a rare and rather magical way. I still like it more than almost everything I’ve written, placing my discomfort so tidily into its formal box.”
‘Dear Mother’ first appeared in Poetry Review.
Andrew Sclater is a Scottish poet currently living in Paris. He has published poems in Ambit, Best Scottish Poems, The Dark Horse, Magma, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, Shearsman and elsewhere. He co-founded Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. He has been an editor of Charles Darwin’s correspondence and his Dinner at the Blaws-Baxters’ was published in 2016 by HappenStance Press. His newest pamphlet Quite Joyful is from Mariscat Press.
Form in Formless Times 