GAS Featured Poet: Rita S. Spalding

Award-winning poet Rita S. Spalding has been published in 18 Calliope anthologies, National Library of Poetry, AX-POW Magazine, The

Heartland Review, Kentucky Monthly Magazine, Keeping the Flame Alive,

Fallen, Rebirth, The Rye Whiskey Review, Walden’s Poetry and Reviews,

Poet-Tree Magazine, American Poet, Mays Publishing and Kentucky

Humanities. Her books include Abstract Ribbons, What is Beauty, and

The Eighth.

She has been featured in podcasts and the Kentucky Author Celebration, Kentucky Writer Celebration, Insomniacathon, Vagabond Poet National Tour, Endless Horizon, and 2025 Ohio Valley Folkways Symposium. Shegives poetry readings nationally and will be at 2026 Gonzofest in New York City.

Words From the Other Side

i saw you from outside my eye

that first fleeting mist of blackness

at my feet racing across the dust bunnies

not sure of your realness

caught in a nebulous gray mist

or were you just a polished apple

stuck in my mind from long ago

you were here I saw you here

shadow following my body

down the quiet hallway and back

yet when I turned you were gone again

i could swear you tried to talk

today at breakfast you brushed my arm

a finger or hand warmed by blood

you darted into the sinking wrinkles

of a cream swirled coffee mug

i saw you from the inside of my third eye

it was you i know it was you

wavy steam only inches above the floor

my third eye never lies

next time when you try to talk

i will listen closely all those words

that were never spoken

when you walked among us

Mary Lou Because You Asked About My Chickens

you asked about my chickens

they are everywhere

the roosters hens their love and pecks

on icy mornings i chipped away their water

in the darkness of the dawn

into the old weathered walls of the coop

i lifted the feeder bigger than me

and clucked for them to fly from

their roosts to meet the grain

watching the shininess of their wings

bright reds with hidden golds

dark blacks with dazzling blues

the deep red of wattles and combs

strutting flapping accepting me into their flock

my hands softly lifted brown eggs

from hay filled nesting boxes

the eggs were marvels to hold

i kissed each one before placing them

in a flower printed muslin seed sack

draped and tied across my shoulders

it fit like a gown and held them like a mama

like i wished for mama arms to hold me

in summer below the sunflowers and apples

i held rhode island reds to my chest

because they let me smell their feathers

i sat in the dusty dirt with black silkies

who were curious about my toes

i knew what love was when i watched them

come closer to my heart with trust in their struts

i live in the city now in this other lifetime

smelling the fumes of progress and traffic

instead of the sweetness of hay scented by hens

i brought the chickens with me

the roosters and hens are frozen in place

ceramic and steady they still call me theirs

they surround me on shelves from room to room

yesterday you asked why they are with me

i answered because they were my beginnings

feathered reminders of how i learned to love

in the darkness of dawn and light of dusk

GAS Featured Poet: PD Lyons

PD Lyons was born and raised in the USA  Since 1998  has resided in Ireland. Spent a few years before  in Cape Brenton Nova Scotia where winters are great for writing. Travelled a bit worked a lot raised two wonderful children as well as horses ( Morgans, Andalusian Thoroughbred, Irish sport horse etc.) in USA and Ireland. Has worked as dishwasher, floor washer, textile mill labourer, construction worker, pesticide sprayer, fire safety inspector, toy shop manager, substance abuse councillor, women’s shoe shop manager etc currently cutting grass in a small medieval village in co. Westmeath Ireland. 

Lyons received the Mattatuck College Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and a Bachelor of Science with honours from Teikyo Post University Connecticut (USA). The work of PD Lyons has appeared in many formats throughout the world. Lyons published poetry collections by Lapwing Press, Belfast and erbacce Press, Liverpool.  Winner of the annual erbacce-press International Poetry Competition for 2019.

Diary

 

Dust in the corner

Pale light through loose boards

Soft paper pages partially filled

 

So small

The world with all its bigness

Could have so easily passed by.

~

Will we, all of us leave the same absence?

Know the same impossible loneliness,

As if somehow shared, could we know one another ?

 

 Each child then, freely

Hand in hand, with their mother

Walking fussing over any small thing,

~

We have all touched this world with little fingers,

As have I.

Not as some imagining or speculation

But as a human being.

Certain of my own sense of purpose.

Afraid, so many things bigger than me.

So many things I could not wait to do.

How long does it take to be a grown up?

~

Unlike you I do know the story’s end.

Unlike you I could not, not know.

Remember me this way:

Small as I was, it all fit into my life.

 

Varying degrees of not knowing,

All that’s left

Between us         

 

(for Annelies)

 

I knew a girl afraid of the wind

 

it would cause her to hide in the basement

 

eventually after she moved

 

to an apartment of her own in the west end

 

there was no basement

 

she would hide in the only room without windows

 

with the minimum amount of intruding sounds

 

the bath room.

 

she had the position of bank manager in a local branch

 

one of those modern type open plan offices large panes of window walls

 

sometimes when on occasion I’d have business at that particular branch

 

we would talk then smoke a cigarette 

 

in the complete silence of tobacco smoke

 

 we’d forget where we were together.

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jerome Berglund

 

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Circle of Salt, and Presence.

Job application

if the 

answer is three 

I’d like 

to know what 

we’re adding up

making light

leaflets blow through 

narrow lane

if all of them 

aren’t participating none 

haven’t been 

aware and

condoning

copper mining 

in dead of night strips 

the school bare

no one 

knows about this stuff or cares 

about this stuff 

or cares to know 

about this stuff

fishnet stockings 

social media 

history 

ethics course — 

curious how many prestigious 

moral relativists 

argue passionately 

in defense of diets

red 

building 

pig farming

behind 

the nineteenth 

hole 

pinochle 

championship

art history 

opening papaya

with a machete 

are some 

nice pigs 

so long as 

they’re stuffed 

on corpses

THE traffiCkingALL 

IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE 

of representatives

of initiation: pizza 

the seventh room 

of Prince Prospero's abbey 

lit a 

deep red

business 

as usual 

massacre of the innocents

revelation 

of the method 

we too 

can guide them gradually 

to the coup de grâce

scooping poop 

when you have a sense of smell

sleeper car

Trump has been arrested! 

. . . breaking news from 

the liberal 

a.i. deep fake wish 

fulfillment teleplays

tree frogs

all the people

hurting

if I hear 

the expression blood libel 

or satanic panic 

ever 

again

a shepherd 

is not aggressive …but it’s 

defensive as f***

mine shaft 

it would be great if no one ever used 

the term conspiracy theorist 

disparagingly 

ever again 

this america 

they may snatch 

and eat me 

2

Moonlight Mushroom

If you need more support for redistribution, reeducation, decentralized power structures, transparency and accountability, here are some snuff films, human experimentation, biowarfare for purposes of population control, racialized eugenics initiatives and demonstrable caste hierarchies, widespread compromise of communications systems and educational materials, affluent people being genuinely vampiric specifically from the poorest most vulnerable populations, assassinations of beloved national treasures, suppressing of treatments and cures for the purposes of profit and to reduce specific demographics, indications of massive false flag operations resulting in enormous loss of life. Hope this will help you swing voters still on the fence. 

quite a storm 

out there

initiated mambo

3

New York Times 

I feel like these AI detection tools are the next Theranos miniLabs. Inconvenient picture of you surfaces in flagrante sacrificio, perhaps after failing to instigate world war three? Clearly a deep state deep fake fake news a.i. parody must be, trouble yourself not our totally trustworthy a.i. tool has a "very high" degree of confidence.

holy cloth

— hey Raefipour, our realtor 

found a map