FROM THIS ISSUE:

In the last knockings of the evening sun
Eve drinks Calvados. Elsewhere in her life
She has played muse and mistress, bitch and wife.
Now all that gunpoint gamesmanship is done.
   — Ann Drysdale, “New Fruit”

One of the characteristics of her poetry, I mean once you’ve got past the proficiency and the wit, is its kindness. Are men kind? Well, we can be of course, but it isn’t what we DO.
   — John Whitworth on Ann Drysdale

Look: the reddened arm of a skinhead sales clerk,
wreathed with bloody thorns of a fresh tattooing.
Shrine-like dimness. There in the jewelry cases,
what am I seeing?
    — Maryann Corbett, “Tattoo and Piercing Parlour”

This is the poet posing, hat in hand,
not as a beggar may when thanks are due
to charitable strangers passing by,
but as a champion in the ring may stand
    — Rhina P. Espaillat, “Lighthouse, with Poet Brandishing His Hat”

Was this the hillside years ago
where wildflowers in tense flambeaux,
  starred each in its is-ness?
What was it in the mind allowed
each breathing creature’s amplitude,
  its hallowed ground of business?
   — Alan Gould, “On Drought and Crime Fiction”

You drove me through the fields of sugar cane:
One house per hill, one little hill per mile.
Developers would see a land in pain
Aching to be a sea of brick and tile.
   — Clive James, “A City with Green Fingers”

Seeing people who remind you
just a little of the dead
is always mildly disconcerting — 
   — Geoff Page, “Seeing People”

Deliciously, in last night’s dream, in stark
Chromatic semitones of silver gloom,
A gangly actress groping through blind dark,
I found you, as I tapped around the room —
   — Jennifer Reeser, “Sonnets from the Dark Lady”, #5

 
Please look in on The Chimaera’s disreputable parent,
  The Shit Creek Review,
and also visit these other zines in which the editors have a hand:  
  The Flea
  14 by 14