GAS Featured Poet: John Martino

John Martino is a writer, photographer, and educator currently residing in Hong Kong with his life-partner, Xiuli. His debut book of poetry, American Sonnet, a suite of 51 "little songs," was published by Half Inch Press in September 2025. Additional poems can be found at North Dakota Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Packingtown Review, The Southern Quill, The Bitchin' Kitsch, and J Journal, among others. He is the Executive Editor at Home Planet News (homeplanetnews.com).

Little Pig, Little Pig

Don't mistake the words on the page

for the poem itself. Don't mistake

rage for direct and clear-minded

intent. Whether gunshot or engine

backfire, the letters jump and scatter,

take flight like a murder of crows,

realign as musical notes on an overhead

wire. The page in your hand is blank,

but the poem remains. Try to blow

it down and, like a house built of solid

air, it absorbs and integrates, grows

stronger. Most nights, I'm behind that

house, aiming arrows at the darkness,

guided only by a howling moon. Don't

mistake this for misdirection. In the sure

light of morning, walking and observing,

look at the many new targets heretofore

unknown: brick heart, human wall,

garden vault, bank gnome. You think

you know, but you don't. The biggest,

baddest toe of them all. A lifetime spent

misreading the signs, no matter how far

you roam. Remember: This little piggy went

to market doesn't mean it comes home.

Whitman Sampler

I celebrate my selfie! And play

with it, too. And what I exhume,

you shall exhume. For every atom

bomb belonging to me

as good belongs to you.

Tabulation of all our days

down to a spear of summer grass.

I grow lean and loath under

camera eyes. Watch me scratch

my patched mass.

I sing the body electrified,

hooded, buggered with a broomstick,

tortured by water, the flick

of a Bic. I sing of truth

extracted with a tooth.

I sing of twisted truths buffed to perfection.

I sing "America the Beautiful

Idea / Someday we'll live inside

the IKEA" and point the way

with invisible hands. The heat

sputters and cracks like Pop Rocks.

I leave teeth marks in every sugar-coated

confession, put all the half-eaten

pieces, each wounded dead,

back into the box.

GAS Featured Poet: Frederick Pollack

Frederick is author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

In the Walls

They were in prison under Putin,

then via miracle

came here; are eventually

imprisoned again under Trump,

freed by a larger miracle. That’s when I meet them.

Her English is better than his but she seldom speaks;

her response to camp conditions was

to become a listener. 

Ravaged smile. He, moon-faced, talks readily,

not only about his continuing, death-defying 

activism but a moment in prison when,

at last, he slept. On the verge

of waking he heard, perhaps a fart, perhaps

a curse from a cellmate, a cry

from above, and perceived them not

as sounds from reality but creaks and footfalls

from the corridors behind

this world. Where gods no smarter than we, 

less in fact but immortal, stumble

endlessly forward, sometimes blundering

into our realm where they, by accident,

do mostly ill.

Those Russians are the sort of friends 

I might have had if my life had been more … 

dynamic. I invented them and project 

experiences onto them because

they’re less averse than I to “spiritual” topics,

and because they’re more important.

Blockage

As isolation spreads, the existence of

a spirit world becomes harder and harder

to deny. Some of the living 

are glad their parents are back (and more

connected, for the most part, than before);

some are horrified. And when it’s

kids who return – well, 

of course one’s overjoyed (although 

they’re always in a sense “special needs”).

Welcome for spouses, friends, siblings

depends on the specifics of relationships. 

There’s a return to family, often very extended.

Conservatives especially value it.

One opinion, hard to articulate, is that

what all this reveals is disappointing. 

Whether believed in or not, the afterlife offered

change, perhaps improvement, at least clarity.

Now we learn that everyone 

just wants to come (back) here.

These clouds of dead are merely (though only

hard-right podcasters say it) immigrants …

There’s also the problem 

of ghosts who return to the wrong place.

One showed up at my place.

Seemed slow, insisted I was someone else,

then began to apologize. 

This was early on; I’m afraid I let 

the pressure we were all under show.

Now, years later, I

wander, trying to find 

him or someone who knew him, say I’m sorry.

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.