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SPECIAL NEWS:

NEW RELEASE – moonShine review – volume 5, issue 2, 10th anniversary issue. Order your copy at the THRIFT Store. And visit our moonShine review page for current Submission Guidelines.

CHAPBOOK HIGHLIGHT – Lemonade & Rumors – a chapbook of poetry by Julie Ann Cook. Order your copy today at the THRIFT Store.

Please note THRIFT Poetic Arts Journal is currently on hiatus. Our apologies for any inconvenience, but please check back for updates.

Special ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF moonShine review NOW AVAILABLE!

Some of the narrators within these pages seek fulfillment of hearts and souls connecting, or gratification of more lustful, primal needs. Others long to understand that which is never truly understood about those closest to them. Some endeavor to satisfy a well-intentioned, yet mischievous, yearning for answers. Universally, all share the desire to find one’s misplaced self and stake a sense of belonging amidst the chaos of relationships. Many struggle to emerge from their seemingly hopeless present to a tangibly promising future, where individuality is encouraged and embraced, and one’s notions of self-worth, identity, and purpose are no longer questioned. Thanks to the following contributors to this special anniversary issue: Authors: Claire Armstrong, Kim Catanzarite, Gail Gray, Charles Israel, Jr., David Jordan, Michael Lucas, Kenneth Pobo, Dorothy Raney, Leslie M. Rupracht, Maureen Sherbondy, Tonya Staufer, Bob Strother, Elizabeth B. Watson, and Tammy Wilson Photographers: Beth Cagle Burt, Julie Ann Cook, Lisa Ellis, Raychelle Heath, Alan Jordan, Russ Kafka, John Allan Lee, and Janice Person moonShine review, volume 5 issue 2, is now available at the THRIFT Store. Visit our moonShine review page for submission guidelines and deadlines, and check out who we are at ABOUT THE MOONSHINE EDITORS.

Check out LEMONADE & RUMORS by Julie Ann Cook

Julie Ann Cook presents excerpts from her chapbook at a Reading at Smelly Cat Café. The individuality of the narrator's voice throughout this collection is deceptively duplicitous. While the honesty here is courageously candid, be warned that, from the outset, this author has the power of poetic license to lie. But also know that there is truth in these poems that transcend the individual to become the human story for each and every one of us. Order your copy today at the THRIFT Store. And check out our other chapbooks too!

POETRY CORNER

This “corner” highlights some of the poetry submissions we receive from time to time.  You can also visit our POETRY CORNER ARCHIVES for any poets previously featured here.  This season’s highlighted poet is David Spiering of Bowling Green, Ohio.

skinny prose: origins
By David Spiering

in a barroom on a
chilly autumn night
professor Dick Pinkflower
sips vodka gimlets—
his cheeks are bright
as raspberries—he says
to me, “read Pinkflower some Poe—
write a paragraph
for Pinkflower on what you’ve
read and Pinkflower’ll tell
you it sucks shit—Pinkflower
has the final word”—I
tell him I write poems;
he says, “repeat after
Pinkflower, ‘I
don’t write poems,
but skinny prose that
sucks shit”—he gets
another gimlet, his teeth
are foxed from smoking
his hair’s smoke-hinted around
his ears and pompadour—
“kid, I’ll teach you to write
narrative poems—in perfect
form”—then I thought
that way he hopes I’ll
immortalize his priggishness
in words bouncing
like a solitary tennis ball

an exhumed pulse meant as movement
By David Spiering

thick-witted people couple-up
while I sit at home drinking beer
and cooking my supper—my hands
have known many secrets my
mouth hasn’t the nerve to tell;
I stand in the night-shaded foliage
thinking about wet beer caches
and wire and how the ground
looks like a moist skull; my diction
swings from my outer edges
in at my soft middle; for
pleasure I run south, my
pelvis feels like it’s a stone crock
my legs are cut out from my bottom,
my eyes long to gleam at
an elderberry palace, slashed
and dumped as punishment,
because what had begun
to feel like reverence, became
a sense of intimate revenge