Oil Change
Cars swarmed archways
of the station where
the receptionist instructed
I pull beside the Nissan,
which I translated to mean
the big silver slug parked
behind the tiny blue,
before handing me
a folded paper
with a number stamped
in the corner,
so I could take my seat
in the congested waiting area
alongside
a college kid working a Rubik’s Cube
and a pregnant woman,
in green tank-top
and Daisy Dukes, bending over
to tell her toddler
be patient and wait
while the rest of us pretended
to be engrossed with Olympians jogging laps
on the mounted big screen.
Early that morning,
each driver drafted a shrewd plot
to avoid the rush,
but fate
put us in this purgatory
to learn
from mechanics
whose diagnostics showed
we had more problems than a routine
oil change could fix
on a Friday.
Kevin J. McDaniel lives in Pulaski, Virginia, with his wife, two daughters, and two old chocolate Labs. To date, his work has appeared, or forthcoming, in Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium, Artemis Journal, Broad River Review, Clinch Mountain Review, Common Ground Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Freshwater Literary Journal, GFT Press, Gravel, JuxtaProse, The Cape Rock, The Main Street Rag, and others. His recent chapbook, Family Talks, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017.
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of the chapbooks Haori (Tea & Tattered Pages Press, 2017), Check & Balance (Moria Press/Locofo Chaps, 2017), and Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015); plus the full length works Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.
Jamie Lynn Heller uses poetry as her caffeine. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee (Little Balkans Review 2014) and Best of the Net nominee (805 Lit + Art 2016). Her chapbook Domesticated was published in 2015 (Finishing Line Press). She received honorable mention awards in Whispering Prairie Press Writing Contest 2012, and Kansas Voices Contest 2017, 2011. For a complete list of publications see 
Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit 
Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of six books of poems and co-editor of a recent poetry anthology. He has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and many other journals. He has won The Paris Review Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and others.
Rosalie Sanara Petrouske received her M.A. in English and Writing from Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. She is an Adjunct Professor in the English Department at Lansing Community College, where she currently teaches Freshman Composition and Creative writing classes. Finishing Line Press published her second book of poems What We Keep in 2016. She wrote the poem “Burnt” about an unusual long and hot Michigan summer, but it’s also about want, and about the things you might want, and never have.
In 2009 Barbara Knott’s poem “Boxwood” was selected by Judge Nikki Giovanni as first-prize winner of the New Millennium Writings Awards 28 prize for poetry. In 2010 Francois Camoin chose her short story “Song of the Goatman” as third-prize winner in the Writers at Work fiction competition. Barbara’s chapbook of poems Soul Mining was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Another chapbook, MANTA Poems, came out in March 2015, also published by Finishing Line Press. Her short story “The Legend of Abigail Jones” received first prize in the wild card category of Atlanta Writers Club’s Spring 2014 competitions. Barbara was selected with a group of poets to represent FLP as readers at the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Dublin, December 2015.
Annette Langlois Grunseth has a BA in Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a lifetime member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review, Midwest Prairie Review, SOUNDINGS: Door County in Poetry, The Poetry Box/Poeming Pigeons, The Ariel Anthology and other publications. Several of her nature poems were set to original music and performed at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. She is retired from a career in Marketing and Public Relations and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with her husband John, where they both advocate for equal rights. She is the author of Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family’s Journey of Gender Transition (Finishing Line Press).
Carol Dorf has two chapbooks available, Some Years Ask, (Moria Press) and Theory Headed Dragon, (Finishing Line Press.) Her poetry appears in E-ratio, Great Weather For Media, Glint, Slipstream, Sin Fronteras, Surreal Poetics, About Place, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, and Maintenant. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches mathematics in Berkeley. 
Cecilia Martinez-Gil is a poet, writer, translator, and former journalist. She has published two full- length poetry collections a fix of ink and Psaltery and Serpentines, and co-wrote the award-winning experimental video Itinerarios. Her poetry has been chosen finalist for the ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award, finalist in the USA National Best Books Award and Runner-Up for the Los Angeles Book Festival Award. Her poems have been published on Levure Littéraire, in Voices, A Santa Monica Women’s College Publication, Anthology of Latin American Writers in Los Angeles, Imaginarias: Antología de Poesía, and in her first chapbook Muecas de Fósforo. Her work as a journalist has been published in magazines and newspapers, in both Spanish and English. She has a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and two M.A.s, in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and in English and Creative Writing. This fall, Cecilia will begin studies at Antioch University, pursuing a dual degree, an M.A. in Urban Sustainability combined with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She teaches English and Latin American Literatures at Santa Monica College.
The Paddock Review 