by Sarah Key

Between periods a mother re-surfaces,
takes a breath while you chug over blood,

broken sticks, lost mouth guards, sweeping it all
your shavers sashay your name sweet as
Tyrolean pastry, Zamboni, Zamboni,

make your getaway clean, leave us a sheet
not to settle old scores, but to smooth a new course

while you spray      a break
in the glide      no bodies collide

you flush and you shush the ice for its
surfers. Between what periods does a mother

get away clean? Her sheets
soak it all up as you hum she laces
her thoughts around once-tiny feet

inhales your fumes catching her breath
her breath ever catching.

Sarah Key, since retiring as a hockey mom, has had a few dozen poems published in print and online, the latest being her muscle-car poem in CALYX and a villanelle in the Spring 2018 issue of The Georgia Review. She is in four anthologies, including Nasty Women Poets. Her creative writing life began in entertainment public relations where she learned to write pure fiction. She has written eight cookbooks and essays for the Huffington Post. Her students at a community college in the South Bronx are her favorite teachers.

At the Health Club

by David Evans

Over and over day after day, breathing on a treadmill
not far from the basketball court, I’m a witness to
The Golden Rule in Motion, 10 young men taking
their warm-up shots before choosing up sides
for a pick-up game. Friends or strangers —
it doesn’t matter — when one of them shoots from
anywhere on the court and makes it, you’d think
the one who got the rebound would be the next
shooter. But instead, the rebounder passes the ball
right back to the shooter: a nice reward for a nice shot.
And it doesn’t matter how many shots go in in a row;
whoever gets the rebound automatically feeds the ball
back to the shooter, and the more shots he makes the
more upright he becomes, and the more authentic
the happy-for-you expression on the passer’s face,
and the crisper and crisper the passes. But after
a miss, the drama suddenly deflates, and it’s anybody’s
ball now, with all the freebie shots the shooter must earn
by staying accurate, until he too misses — and takes his
place inside the paint with the other low-key rebounders,
willing not only to receive but also to bestow a kindness.

David Evans has had nine poetry collections published. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, The Norton Book of Sports, Splash: Great Writing About Swimming, and American Sports Poems. He was a Fulbright Scholar twice in China, and a professor and writer-in-residence at South Dakota State University. He was also poet laureate of South Dakota for 12 years and received the Governor’s Award for Creative Achievement in the Arts in 2009.

Surprising

by Kara Thom

How the redundancy of a daily five-mile run
could end tragically. A block from home.

Neighbors depended on seeing you — looked for you,
especially, when it was ten below — but couldn’t protect you.

What does consistency matter in the end?

You lived to say you played piano
every day, including the day you died.

Believing in routines, logs, details, except,
you couldn’t remember to zip your own fly.

Ultimately good clean living was no match for the impact.

But this, she will never forget: Your granddaughter
fell asleep in your arms the last time you saw her.

And who knows what might have been beyond seventy-eight years.
A diagnosis? Memory loss? A sudden decline in health?

Or, the alternative we mourn? Warm winters in Florida, reigning
at shuffleboard. Cooking for your wife. Dying peacefully in your sleep.

No matter the surprise ending, consistency outlived you:
Your race number for the next 10K already assigned.

 In Memory of John Miklethun

Kara Douglass Thom is a freelance writer and author of nine books including, Becoming an Ironman: First Encounters with the Ultimate Endurance Event and the children’s book series for the Go! Go! Sports Girls. Her poetry has appeared in the anthology, Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems’ and several online journals. She is the 2018 recipient of the Gaia Fenna Memorial Fellowship at Tofte Lake Center for Artists. She lives in Chaska, Minnesota, with her husband and four children, where she often finds inspiration for her work while running the trails near her home.

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Safe At Home

 by Charles W. Brice

For Malik Hamilton

Last night, Andrew McCutchen, “Cutch” to us, slammed a tough one
into right field that hopped happily over Minnesota’s Eddie Rosario’s
left shoulder and dribbled onto the wall where Rosario, like the lame god
Hephaestus (what was he thinking?), took his sweet time retrieving the orb,
while Cutch, speedy as Apollo’s chariot, rounded third base and smashed
into the Twin’s Mount Olympus in the earthly form of Edwardo Nunez.

Their collision made the Hadron Collider blush and set the Richter Scale
thumping. The men who used to be in blue, but are now in gray,
called interference on Mount Olympus and sent our Pittsburgh Apollo
to the safety of home plate. Later, Cutch made poetry of the event,
“Definitely a foul there,” he said. “Fifteen yard penalty, roughing the passer,
automatic first down.” Andrew, our passer, was safe at home,

as I hope he is tonight and all the nights of his young life. I hope
he avoids the men in black who threw Eric Garner, Samuel Dubose,
Jonny Gammage, Walter Scott, John Crawford III, Dontre Hamilton,
and so many African American men out of the game forever,
out before they got to third base — passers, under
the lights of this long American night.

Charlie Brice is a recovering psychoanalyst. His first poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, was published by WordTech Editions in June, 2016. His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Avalon Literary Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Spitball, VerseWrights, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He is an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review’s Poetry 2015 International Poetry Competition, and his poem, “Wild Pitch,” was named one of the 75 best poems in Spitball magazine.

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by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Earrings, wingbacks, beads to a necklace and their string, sunglasses, bike gloves, cans of coconut water, jerky, hair rubber bands, tire pressure, energy, fear — in every communal shower in small town schools something slides down the drain. A visor, a pair of bike gloves, a set of house keys, remain somewhere in the grass. Slide out of jersey and an unidentifiable object bounces to tent floor. On such rides, everyone is stripped of riches, reduced to the body, the tongue, to the necessary speech, the hook.

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 22 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, selected for the Nebraska 150 Book List. Her collaborative book with artist Sally Deskins, Intimates and Fools, is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her book Drink won the 2016 Independent Publisher Bronze Book Award for poetry. Her recent collections are An Apparently Impossible Adventure and Leaves of Absence. Her essay “Seven Cities of Good” was an honorable mention in Pacifica Literary Review’s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Award. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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