Dashboard Horus: A Bird's Eye View of the Universe

  Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her poetry is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/ Bourgas to Varna In the days when East was east and West was west we were travelling in Bulgaria and wanted to go from Bourgas to Varna. So we bought a bus ticket from the office in town. and helpful locals directed us to the bus station. But once there we were lost and searched in vain for the bus stop. We asked and asked, showed everyone the ticket but no one could help. Many pointed to the office nearby. But we already had a ticket for the correct date and time. We were lost beyond our understanding. And then there was a sound, a sound of ship’s hooter a...

Elizabeth Jaeger’s essays, short stories, book reviews and poetry have been published in various print and online journals, including Margate Bookie, Caustic Frolic, The Blue Nib , Capsule Stories , Watchung Review, Ovunque Siamo, Peacock Journal, Boston Accent Lit, and Italian Americana. Her memoir Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. You can find her at: https://jaegerwrites13.wordpress.com , on Instagram @jaegerwrites, and on TikTok @papajaegertheowl. I was more tired than hungry. My jaw ached from a constant stream of yawns and my eyelids felt like sacks of cement. Our first day in Seoul had passed in a blur. I remembered virtually nothing of it after we arrived at Wonderland’s headquarters, the academy in which we would teach for the next twelve months. Even though the sun had not yet set, as soon as Dave—our English speaking liaison with Wonderland — showed us to the hotel, I laid down on the lumpy double bed. The bright sun pushed ...

  L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Main Street Rag, others), and he is the author of four full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including his latest collection, Green Shoulders: New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow, 2023). Abel resides in rural Georgia. Funnel Conjured: a 1979-moment as I stepped from the boat at Calais when the Bering Strait was strangely lit in the distance and in a trice was sliced ahead at an edge of the super-landmass into infinite sections. There were no lines on the ground showing passage to or through that big continent. It’s water or land that always turns us back, or mountains like blood that hover. But maybe green bridges of soil stretch out beyond, I thought— the funnel that fed and opened a halved planet. I laughed. I walked. © 2024 L. Ward Abel

  A Squint of Spain 2022 I purchased a straw hat and sunglasses, so that I could blend right in with most of the other assholes: unlike a majority of my fellow countrymen, I was absent of a shaved head, a fat gut, a big mouth and bad tattoos and they began drinking pale, watered down beer at 10:30 am: I left out the booze until late evening, I enjoy drinking alone and listening to music of my own choosing: I’d sit on the room’s balcony and gaze across at the 5 storeys, sprawling apartment complex opposite and observed life in all its variety as I drank my wine: any night I would see half-naked young women strutting from room to room, gay men in boxer shorts romantically dancing, cat’s balancing on 3 rd storey windowsills, one guy who would constantly lean out of his 4 th floor window and look up and down the street and then shake his head and disappear for a few minutes and then return: an elderly couple whose faces were lit by a flickering television screen, sometimes, I heard th...