I recently lost my job. With nothing much to do, I sneaked the other week into an exhibition at the Galerie der Moderne. The walls were hung with paintings by people who didn’t seem to know how to paint. However, I did enjoy the complimentary wine and the cubes of cheese on frilly toothpicks. I would have stayed longer, only there were these police around. In the old country, my great-grandfather went to fetch a ration of bread, and the loaf was sticking out of his coat when the SS officer who shot him for sport rolled his corpse over.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Famous Long Ago, a forthcoming prose poetry collection from Laughing Ronin Press.

My fate had been decided and I’m not sorry. The hunger in the pit of my stomach was more important than the consequences. When I barreled my fist into the man’s face and he fell to the ground motionless, I took the bread with my sore, bloody knuckles and ran. Within a day, the sheriff apprehended me.

The sheriff led me outside to a chanting crowd, hands tied tightly behind me, to the noose that awaits my neck.

From Guest Contributor Lisa Scuderi-Burkimsher

What is inside you is going to come out. I think of it as a crime scene. You have brought your dead cat, placing it wrapped in a pink baby blanket on the floor. I feel in the wrong just being there. Before the exam starts, you ask the girl seated behind you for paper, but are given a slice of bread. I can’t explain it. I would need to Google you to find out. At the front of the room, the proctor makes a gun with his thumb and forefinger and then holds it to his temple and fires.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Life as a kelp farmer meant eating a lot of kelp. They said it was the most efficient source of nutrition known to humankind, but that did nothing to offset its blandness. If anything, knowing how healthy it was for you made it worse.

If it were up to Monica, she’d be doing just about anything else. But these days, there was only job, and that was harvesting kelp. So that’s what she did.

I only ever communicate with Kari on Facebook. We are too similar now, both forever reliving the war we shared like stale bread. She lost her Navy career after an inpatient stay while I am just trying to get to the end of mine by avoiding the pills doctors offer for anxiety and depression. Yesterday she posted a picture from Camp Bastion of her and a British nurse we worked with. The caption said this is my favorite person from Camp Bastion. I write in the comments section my least favorite person from Bastion was me. She says she understands.

From Guest Contributor Matthew Borczon

Public poems built on public property are, as they say, asking for it. When you use such flimsy bread, eating away at holy Wonder until such thinly-sliced letters remain, every one meant to be swallowed, not whispered; when you hold them down with found rocks in a stream that is not a stream, just a concrete ditch void of the hand of God; when you slip out the window in the night like a Sufi thief or an idiot child, praying the wrong way, dancing naked, licking vowels in your own nonsense language
don’t expect to get anything
except
arrested.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

After graduating with a BA in English from Vassar College, Brook Bhagat landed her first paid writing job as a reporter for a small-town Colorado newspaper. She left it to travel to India, where she fell in love, got married and canceled her ticket home. She and her husband Gaurav write freelance articles for dozens of publications, including Outpost, Ecoworld, and Little India. In 2013, they launched www.BluePlanetJournal.com, which she edits and writes for. She also teaches writing at a community college, is earning her MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University, and is writing a novel.

After the day’s hard work I returned to my hut. In the corner slept my 9-year-old daughter, abused recently by rich boys. My fisherman husband had strayed far into the sea. Hungry I walked to the corner of the hut. There was a tomato and two slices of stale bread. I made a soup. The bread, I broke it down to crumbs. Counting one for one suffered sorrow, I drowned it in the soup. I and my girl sipped it as long as possible, in silence, wishing all the sorrows would drown the same way in this crumb of life.

From Guest Contributor Thriveni C. Mysore

Henry was an old man. In the last ten, maybe twenty years, he realized that he had grown invisible. When shopping, picking a loaf of bread off the shelf, or choosing a couple of oranges at the produce counter, young people would pass by, almost brushing into him, but not making eye contact or offering a greeting. At the front entrance of the post office, an attractive young lady appeared, face to face at the large, double doors. She stared straight ahead, not changing her expression. She looked through the old man as if he was glass in the door.

From Guest Contributor, Thomas Pitre